


the chain

by younglegends



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But Only After Everybody Dies, Canon-Typical Violence, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Everybody Lives, Fix-It, Gen, Groundhog Day, Stanley Uris Lives, Suicide, Time Loop, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:20:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25083013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/younglegends/pseuds/younglegends
Summary: The call comes in the evening.Or: Stan gets stuck in a time loop. It gets worse before it gets better.
Comments: 24
Kudos: 57





	the chain

**Author's Note:**

> content warnings: temporary major character death, suicide/suicidal ideation, psychological horror, and the whole gamut of canon-typical violence, murder, blood, gore, body horror, and references to abuse. this fic follows the movies, but a few characterization/plot concepts are carried over from the book. relationships are untagged as they are not the primary focus of the fic, but expect minor stan/pat, ben/bev, and eddie/richie.
> 
> thanks and apologies to the tl who had to bear witness to my daily agonies and revelations while writing this fic when literally none of them even go here ♡

I CAN STILL HEAR YOU SAYING  
YOU WOULD NEVER BREAK THE CHAIN

fleetwood mac

\+ 01

The call comes in the evening.

The lamplight is drawn tight around the living room in a cocoon of spun gold. Within its reaches, the house is warm, orderly; everything in its place. Outside, the rain crashes down against the windows, a blurry film over the glass that muddies the colours of the autumn-drenched leaves. The shadows of the trees running formless and deep. All sorts of shapes and shifting things in the darkness, if one cares to look. 

Stan has his phone pressed against his ear, the skin of his cheek; he has forgotten the reason for it. A jigsaw piece is in his hand, a picture assembled before him. Wings and claws and eyes. Dark feathers curling at a ruby throat, the soft downy fur hidden close to the heart.

“You made a promise,” Mike says, his voice well-worn over the miles, over the years, and Stan remembers the reason, now. The reason he is holding this phone: to answer the call. The reason he is holding this jigsaw piece: to finish the puzzle. “We all did. Are you going to keep it?”

On the television screen, a studio audience is laughing. Over on the couch, Patty laughs with them. The sound of it another reminder—where he is, what he must do, and why. Stan shifts the hold of his phone in his hand and slots the final piece into place at the centre of the puzzle.

“Yes,” Stan says. “I will.” 

A shiver, as he says it. The faint whisper of a chill that has passed him by.

He packs a bag: change of clothes, toiletries, shaving kit. Lingers for a moment with the razor balanced in his hand, blade laid clean against palm, a line of phantom pain. Uses the same hand to cup Patty’s cheek when he kisses her goodbye, at the front of the door, at the edge of the light. Half in the rain and half out of it, dripping wet into his hair. The cab honks, twice.

He lands in Derry, Maine by morning.

“Well, fuck me,” Richie Tozier says with something like real reverence in his eyes. “If it isn’t Stan the Man, in the flesh.”

“Where else would I be?” Stan says, not deigning to give him the gratification of a reaction like Bev’s snort or Eddie’s screwed-up face of annoyance. 

“It’s funny, though,” Ben says. He darts a thoughtful glance at Bev. “Some of us were never even that far off from each other, but we just didn’t know how close we were, all this time.”

“And then there’s me,” Bill says wryly. “Ended up all the way across the damn country from all of you.”

“As far away as you can get, really,” Mike comments. Leant back in his chair, it sounds almost like a neutral observation.

“Oh, Bill,” Richie cooes, simpering with a hand clasped to his chest, “I missed you too, I dreamed of your tenderly scruffy face every night in my sleep—”

“Beep beep, Richie,” snaps Eddie, and Stan has to use all twenty-seven of his hard-earned years of maturity to keep from rolling his eyes.

There are bits and pieces still scattered between them, bones of their childhood that have yet to be excavated. Was it you who said...? Were you there when...? That day, in the field—was it your hand in mine? Still, they sit in a circle, the seven of them, and feel a power slowly unearth itself from time. Stan senses it in a prick in the back of his neck, the pain in his palms. The looks in their eyes when he meets their gazes across the table: Ben’s easy lopsided smile, Bev whose laughter rings a shade too harsh in its relief, good old Eddie rubbing at his wrist like he’s just remembered something, wince pulling at his mouth; a bad break. It’s all coming back to them now, Stan thinks, and cannot parse whether the buzz in his blood is anticipation or dread. It’s all coming back to them; it’s coming back; it’s coming.

At the centre of the table, a fortune cookie cracks in two, and inside, something opens its jaw, takes its first hungered mouthful of air. 

It’s not until they get back to the shuttered safety of the Townhouse that Bev finally confesses, over a cigarette: “I’ve seen us die.”

“Okay, you know what,” Richie says, throwing up his hands. 

Nobody bothers to listen to him finish his sentence. “Wow,” says Eddie, knuckles growing white around the handle of his suitcase, “and you didn’t think to mention this until now? Hey guys, great to see you again, by the way we’re all going to be gruesomely murdered because I saw it happen in my dreams?”

“Look, you were here too,” Ben says, “you remember what it was like, back then. How is this any less believable than what happened to us that summer?”

“It’s _entirely_ unbelievable!” Eddie insists, but the fear on his face tells a different story. 

Bev is quiet as they argue, preoccupied with her cigarette. Stan steps up next to her. None of it makes sense, really, but he finds himself overcome by a nagging curiosity. 

“What did you see, exactly?” he asks. “In your dreams?” 

A light in her eye reflects a far-off distance; Stan resists the urge to look over his shoulder. Then her gaze focuses on him, and her eyes clear. 

“They might not be real,” Bev says. “I don’t know, I just thought...” Her words trail off, and she shakes her head. “But look at us. We’re fine, aren’t we? All of us. Everything’s fine. It isn’t real; it can’t be.”

But her fingers tremble around her cigarette. The Beverly Marsh he remembers—he remembers now—has a steady hand. Her aim is true. Standing in a bathroom full of blood: _you see it too, right? You see it, too. It’s real._

“It isn’t real,” Bev repeats, tugging the sleeve of her jacket down over her wrist, but when Mike and Bill come clattering into the hotel lobby to prove her wrong, she doesn’t look surprised at all. 

_Where did you go, that summer,_ Mike asks them, and Stan finds himself sitting in an old, emptied synagogue, staring up at the podium. Once his voice rang out through the lofty stillness of the room, reached every crack in the walls, stirred the dust from the pews. He runs a finger through the fine layer of it now, collected on the seats, settled patient and complete over everything.

There is nothing left here but hollow memory, he realizes. Nothing left here for him.

He stands to leave, and as he does, he puts his hands in his pockets. His fingers brush against a fistful of waxy, thin fabric. He pulls it out: a shower cap from the clubhouse, one he’d rescued from the buried recesses of their childhood and then forgot to replace. With it pries loose echoes of long-ago laughter, shaking the foundations of their secret hideaway carved out of the ground, dirt and earth raining into their hair from the forgotten world above.

That day when his voice moved this room, Stan thinks, turning to look at the spot in the pews where a bespectacled face had grinned broadly back at him. It was because he wasn’t alone.

He isn’t now, either. A shadow falls crooked across the floor. Spreads itself long and creeping like a stain.

“Stanley, boy,” it croons in his father’s voice.

Stan’s mouth dries. His grip tightens around the shower cap in his hand. He fixes his stare down at the ground. Every muscle locking up, keeping himself frozen perfectly still, as though if he does not see it, the fear cannot really be there. Cannot hurt him.

The shadow is growing. “Stanley,” it repeats. “My boy. You left me. You left without me.”

Stan is faintly aware of his teeth grinding in the back of his jaw. Careful to keep from turning his head, his gaze flicks back to the empty spot in the pews. Nobody is sitting there; no thundering applause for his single shining moment. And it’s a different grin that lunges into his vision now, splitting open before him, gaping wide and waiting, all lined inside with red.

“Stanley,” IT shrieks, and then doesn’t say anything more at all; doesn’t have to. Only laughs and laughs and laughs.

The last of Stan’s resolve crumbles with all the grace of a rotted basement floorboard. He lurches to his feet and through the rows of pews, pulse roaring so loud in his ears he can scarcely hear the laughter chasing after him. Running is an inelegant pursuit, his breath jumbled in his throat as he crashes against the walls and blindly fumbles for his way out, all order abandoned. His sense of direction whittled down to the oldest instinct he remembers: a primal fear of the dark. 

He bursts through the doors and into open air, sunlight, and even then he doesn’t stop running. He doesn’t look back.

Only when he reaches stoplights and slow traffic does he force himself to an abrupt halt, breath heaving in gasps, sweat clumping hair into his eyes. The wary stares of strangers turn openly hostile when he watches them back. As though the darkness has followed him out. As though it’s already here.

At his side, his fist opens. The slivered indentations of his nails are creased into the flower-patterned fabric. 

So simple; so stupid. He’s already found all that he has. Staring down at it, Stan lets out a breath, hefts the weight of understanding in his palm: back then, all he had wanted was to protect his friends. He couldn’t do it, of course, not in the way that truly mattered, so he compensated instead with ordinary measures against everyday perils—a first aid kit for a skinned knee and a voice of reason for a bad idea and a shower cap for their hair whenever they went underground. Nothing that ever lived up to the promise he had written in blood, on his skin, but there was something noble about it all the same; the only thing that gave him dimension, that made him as real as they were. And the determination with which he clung to this purpose, in retrospect, was what gave it any value at all. A value still worth something, perhaps.

Something he can still stand to lose.

He tucks the shower cap back into his pocket and starts the long trek back to the others.

He doesn’t make it in time. 

The new state of things: Richie’s run, Bill’s gone, Henry Bowers’ carved his way back into Derry through a newly ripening gash on Eddie’s cheek. “The fair?” Stan repeats, because it makes no sense. “What’s Bill gone to the fair for?”

“A kid,” Bev says as she bandages Eddie’s bloodied face, “he went after some kid,” and now it all makes perfect sense, not just Bill’s absence but the mess he’s left behind: the furl of Bev’s lower lip worried between her teeth, the tensed hunch of Ben’s shoulders beside her. The misery he wears like an ill-fitting suit he’s long outgrown but never thought to replace, still stuck to him in the frame of his thirteen-year-old self. It has been decades since Stan knew them, but their childhood habits come back to him so familiar they might as well be telegraphed on a screen. He politely averts his gaze from whatever secrets they think they’re keeping and watches Eddie cradle his wrist in his hand.

“Did you injure your arm, too?” Stan asks.

Eddie starts; Bev mutters something under her breath and grabs hold of his chin to keep him still. “No,” he says as best as he can manage through the blood in his mouth, and he looks surprised at his own admission, dropping his wrist back into his lap. “No, just this fucking hole in my face.” He points at it helpfully, in case Stan’s missed it, and Bev instantly swats his hand back down and out of the way. Something experienced in the efficiency with which she fixes up his wound, practiced and without gentleness, like she knows how to deal with injury, but knows also that it is supposed to hurt. 

Stan’s eyes flick between the three of them—the three that are left—as something starts to make itself known in his gut. Tension coiling in a rope, the slow work of worry gnawing at the knot. 

“Where’s Mike?” he asks.

“Mike?” Bill’s voice is slurred through the phone, thick with tears, with a familiar stutter. “Mike, I cuh-can’t—I c-c- _couldn’t_ save him—oh God, it happened ag-g-gain, it’s h-happening again—”

“Bill,” Stan says. The phone pressed against his ear, numb in his hand. “Bill. Where are you?”

“Stan? Is that you? Where’s Mike, I have to go—tell him I have to go b-b-back, I have to end th-this—”

Knelt on the floor of the library, Bev lets out a sob so loud Bill must hear it through the phone, because he falls silent at once, sucking in a sharp breath.

“Bev? Was that Bev? What’s going on, Stan, what happened—”

“No,” says Ben with a keening moan, staggering backward. Henry Bowers’ hunting knife drops from his hand, slick with blood, and clatters onto the floor.

“Bill, you have to come back,” Stan hears himself say in a steady voice, thin and distant. Clinical. “You have to come back. You’re in danger. You have to come to the library. Mike, he’s...” And here he lapses for the first time, not because he can’t say it, but because he can’t understand it, clear as it is in front of him. “Mike is—”

But Bill already knows it, or else some part of him does. _“No,”_ Bill says, his voice cracking like a child’s, “no, no. Not Mike. Please, no.” For a minute he just breathes loud and ragged into the phone. Stan stays on the line, keeps still, says nothing at all, and in the space of that minute the silence feels like it can be enough, an understanding between them, this terrible thing they share. Then Bill speaks again, and his voice is hardened with resolve. “I’m guh-guh-going, Stan. It has to be m-m-me. I have to end it. Get everyone out of here, d-d’you hear me? Get everyone s-s-safe.”

Too late Stan realizes the silence is gone; he can break it. “Bill,” he says, but he’s already hung up. 

“Bill? Was that Bill?” Eddie’s face is ashen. “Where is he? Is he coming? Did he find Richie?”

“He’s going back,” Stan says. There’s a streak of blood on the screen of Mike’s phone; he wipes it away with his sleeve, then wishes he hadn’t. The stain’ll never come out.

“Back? To _Los Angeles?”_ Eddie says, incredulous.

Stan just looks at him, until his face pales even further.

“Oh, fuck,” Eddie says.

On the floor, Bev rocks back and forth, still crying. Ben reaches out a hand—the unbloodied one, Stan’s mind notices—and lays it on her shoulder. She shakes it off. 

Next to Henry’s hulking corpse, Mike looks almost peaceful in comparison, his face framed under the fall of Bev’s hair as she crouches over him, a mourning veil. His throat is bared open and sloppy, as though it could spill out all he had left to tell them, blood rich in red.

“I saw it,” Bev wails, “I saw us die, I’m sorry.”

Something moves.

Bev jerks away, Eddie hurls himself back against the wall, and Ben lunges for the knife on the ground, but Stan can only stare, can only feel his limbs lock into place again as Henry rises with a reanimated grin, meaty hands lifting up, reaching for Bev, ready to close in around her neck. Bev skids desperately backwards across the floor, kicking and screaming, and the heel of her boot catches Henry square in the face with a sickening crunch. His head snaps back, and Ben’s there to catch him with the knife, driving it into his throat from behind. Henry spasms violently in his hold, as though a puppet with its strings cut, before collapsing for a second and final time. 

Still Ben doesn’t stop, wrestling his body to the ground and bringing the knife down again and again, long after he’s stopped moving, and with each stab Ben sobs: “Leave us alone, leave us alone, _leave us alone—”_

“Ben,” Bev says, scrambling forward to throw her arms around him, trying to pull him away. “Ben, he’s dead—it’s over—Ben, _stop,_ please stop, you’re going to hurt yourself!”

Pressed against the wall, Eddie’s got something clasped in his hand; an old vice. He squeezes his eyes shut and lifts the inhaler up to his mouth.

Stan sees none of it. He hasn’t moved. He has eyes only for Mike, laid lonely at their feet, his face tilted heavenward, gazing past any of their reach. His eyes glassy and patient with the stare of someone who has waited for a very long time, and only has longer still to go.

The windows of Neibolt House are cracked in. Shards of broken glass litter the front walk, the yard strangled with weeds. The door is open, creaking on its hinges, swaying in the wind. 

“He’s not here,” Ben says slowly.

“No,” Eddie says, shaking his head, “the dumb fuck, he’s already inside.”

They linger on the doorstep for a few moments, as though waiting. For somebody to say something, perhaps. Nobody does. Richie and his loudmouth are missing in action; their leader’s gone on ahead; their guide is dead. Bev has her arms wrapped around herself, staring at the door as though she can already see straight through it. Ben’s face is sunken hollow with a devastated sort of shock like he’s caved in on himself. Even Eddie’s usual anxious tendency to babble has been silenced as he stands there blinking between them, clutching his inhaler, looking bereft.

And Stan?

In the years since he has seen them last, he’s refined himself into a measure of impeccability, the precision he was never quite able to exact as a child. Now he can feel the uncertainty returning, all of it, a deep-set fear that grabs hold of his bones and shakes. They’re out of place. They’re out of time. Nothing’s right, none of it: none of this was supposed to happen this way.

The door is beckoning.

Inside, Ben screams in agony as cruel little letters carve themselves into the skin of his stomach, mocking him for what he’s tried to leave behind. Bev’s knuckles are bleeding from smashing the mirror with her bare fists, though she doesn’t even seem to notice. Eddie will barely move forward at all, inching through the darkness with his breath coming in shallow bursts, fingers clenched firmly around his inhaler. But it’s not until Stan nears the door of the next room that he feels true dread settle under his skin. An eerie stillness, a silence so absolute that Stan keeps still, doesn’t move, so that he’ll never have to break it; he’ll never have to see. 

He doesn’t have to. The door swings open by itself with a creak. Inside, a monstrous silhouette turns its rotting face towards them from the inside of a fridge. A head, severed from its body, tumbling out to stand spiderlike on long spindly legs, and its face is grinning, is dead, is Mike. 

“You’re too late,” it giggles, eyes rolling back in its head, “you came back much too late, too late for Big Bill and too late for me. After all, twenty-seven years without seeing your friends is sure enough to make someone lose his head!” 

And it launches up into the air, teeth bared, and lands on Stan’s face.

Later, after Ben’s stabbed the head clean through and Bev’s thrown it out of the room, she turns on Eddie. “Please, Eddie,” she says, tears streaming down her face. “He could have died, we’re going to die, Eddie—Eddie, please, I need you to be brave—”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says, hunched in on himself in the corner of the room. “I was just scared, I was so scared, I’m scared.”

He looks so small, Stan thinks absently. Like how he looked when he was younger, cradling his arm in a cast, always seeming trapped in his own body. Still, somehow Stan never thought of him that way: small and scared and breakable. He was all those things, of course, but he was also so much quicker than the rest of them—quick to react, to shout, to run. Propelled forward by anger or spite or the sheer momentum of his own fear; all the tiny little invisible things in this world that could hurt him, if only they could catch him. But Eddie would never let himself be caught. He would never have been left behind.

Now Stan thinks Eddie might be crying. He thinks _he_ might be crying, or else that must be blood on him, blood where Mike’s dead face had looked down upon his and laughed and tried to sink its teeth in, and the whole time Stan was thinking _Mike you never told us what your artifact was, your sacrifice, what you held onto by yourself all this time in order to let it go, we’ll never know and I should have asked, I think I should have asked—_

Bev and Ben are on either side of him, their hands in his, hoisting him up to his knees. Bev’s hair falls across Stan’s face; Ben’s sturdy arm comes up against Stan’s chest, holding him up. He can feel the jolt of their pulses at their wrists, their terror and panic and crashing relief. Stan thumbs the skin of Ben’s palm, tilts his face up to Bev to repeat hoarsely in her ear: “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding,” Ben says, touching his fingers to the side of Stan’s face, and Stan remembers for the first time in twenty-seven years the lines he’s tracing, the old faint scars that only look like bite marks under the right light. A wild dog in the woods, he used to explain as a teenager; then as time passed and the marks faded it became an ordinary bicycle accident in his youth, then a bad fall as a child, then simply something that had always been a part of him. 

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says again, stricken. Like he’s witnessed not some inhuman horror but a new face of his own self that previously went unknown, hidden inside all this time, now unearthed and illuminated in the dark. An underlying condition. “I’m sorry.”

Bev’s hand squeezes around Stan’s, reminding him to stand, that this isn’t over yet. Stan’s body aches; his fingers tremble. He thinks, it will be. 

They make it through the house. They make it down the well. They’re deep in the sewers before Eddie freezes up and says “I can’t,” all rushed out in a single breath like he can’t get enough air, despite how often he’s been puffing on his inhaler. “I can’t do it, I can’t go any further, I can’t.”

“Eddie,” Bev whispers. Her eyes reflecting a far-off distance. “Eddie, please.”

“We can’t go back,” Ben says. “There’s nothing left for us there.”

“But there’s nothing ahead of us, either,” Eddie says, and his voice is so small.

Stan is silent. The waist-deep water seeps cold through his shoes, through the fabric of his clothes. Bits of flotsam bump against him like fish belly-up in the water: a schoolbook, an eyeless doll, a child’s unlaced shoe. A paper boat drifting lazily down the tunnel.

A chill spreads over him. He follows after it, wading through the water.

“Stan,” Bev calls, but he pays her no attention. Eyes fixed on the paper boat as it bobs up and down in the water, as it rounds the bend and nudges against the swollen fingers of Bill Denbrough. Floating facedown as though just another child who stayed out too late after dark, who spoke to a stranger, who wandered alone from his friends and never came back.

“No,” Bev moans, the word seeming to be wrenched from her chest, her expression one of utter collapse. She grabs the body by the shoulders and turns him onto his back. Stan wishes she hadn’t. Bill’s skin is a mottled grey-blue, his face bloated and unrecognizable. A gaping hole is ripped out of his chest, his shattered ribcage on deliberate display.

“Is that,” Eddie says. “That’s. That’s Bill? That’s not Bill. That’s not Bill, this isn’t real, this isn’t fucking real—”

“His heart,” Ben says, “IT ate his _heart,”_ and he turns and throws up, straight into the water.

Stan looks at them, his eyes adjusting to the dark, and it’s strange; he could swear that it’s their thirteen-year-old selves with him now. He looks down at himself. He’s thirteen, too. So is Bill, rising up from the water. They’re thirteen and Bill is looking him in the eyes, earnest, steadfast, sweet. _Swear it, Stan. Do you swear?_

“I swear, Bill,” Stan means to say, only what comes out is “I’m scared, Bill,” and he means it not as a plea for forgiveness like Eddie had, but a surrender. 

The others turn to face him, all talking over one another. Why are they shouting? Someone he can’t see is laughing. Bill’s face is still before him in his vision, bright and youthful and alive, round as a balloon fit to burst. His smile speaks a different oath, though still one of blood. He’s reaching out to Stan, and Stan reaches back. But it’s the darkness that receives him, gripping hold of his hands, his wrists, and how curious—the shadows lace over his skin like teeth. 

“Swear it,” says the thing wearing Bill’s face, and through its mouth Stan sees nothing but light, pure in its promise. A certainty so absolute that Stan can rise up into the air to meet it, freed from old burdens like earth and gravity and fear. Not quite flight, not belonging to the birds who hold his fascination; something lighter, hollowed of the heart. Like floating. He’s floating.

He’s floating, and in the face of that promise the light winks out faster than the yank of a chain. In its wake there is nothing left but him and his shallow breathing in the darkness, and then just the darkness, complete. 

\+ 02

The phone is ringing.

It’s evening. The lamplight is drawn tight around the living room in a cocoon of spun gold. Outside, the rain crashes down against the windows, a blurry film over the glass; beyond it, the shadows of the trees run formless and deep. Shapes and shifting things in the darkness, if one cares to look.

Stan presses his phone against his ear. The skin of his cheek. A jigsaw piece in his hand.

“You made a promise,” Mike says. “We all did. Are you going to keep it?”

But Mike, Stan thinks, I already did.

On the television, a studio audience is laughing. Over on the couch, Patty laughs with them.

The thought fades as instantly as it had come. Stan can’t remember what it was; can barely remember this voice through the telephone, well-worn over the miles, over the years. He slots the final piece into place at the centre of the puzzle.

“Yes,” Stan says. “I will.”

He packs a bag. His palm is stinging, though there’s no sign of injury. He uses the same hand to cup Patty’s cheek when he kisses her goodbye, at the front of the door. Half in the light and half out of it. Rainwater dripping into his hair, running down the back of his neck.

He lands in Derry, Maine by morning.

“Well, fuck me,” says Richie Tozier with something like reverence in his eyes. “If it isn’t Stan the Man, in the flesh.”

“Where else would I be?” Stan says, and then pauses. Frowns. 

“It’s funny, though,” Ben says. He darts a thoughtful glance at Bev. “Some of us were never even that far off from each other, but we just didn’t know how close we were, all this time.”

“And then there’s me,” Bill says wryly. “Ended up all the way across the damn country from all of you.”

“As far away as you can get, really,” Mike comments. 

“Oh, Bill,” Richie cooes, simpering with a hand clasped to his chest, “I missed you too, I dreamed of your tenderly scruffy face every night in my sleep—”

“Beep beep, Richie,” snaps Eddie, and Stan knocks over his water glass.

There’s a shocked silence, the momentum of the conversation pulling up short. Then everyone launches into a flurry of motion, all talking at once. “Shit, Stan,” Richie says, scooting his bowl safely out of the way, while Eddie throws a wad of balled-up napkins at him. 

“Stan, are you all right?” Mike asks.

“Sorry,” Stan says, “I’m sorry,” and he doesn’t mean the stain spreading over the tablecloth, but he can’t think of what else he might be apologizing for. “I’m fine. My hand slipped. I just—lost my train of thought.”

As he says it he can almost see it in his vision, the rapid-fire flicker that passes him by in the black of the night. He can’t quite grasp onto its source or destination, but he can feel the force that powers its path, the current that runs through each moment as though an unspooling thread. And there’s a terrible thrill to the whole thing coming undone, twenty-seven tightly coiled years, but there’s a lurking dread, too, some unspeakable danger at the core waiting to be revealed. He can’t see it yet, but he can sense it near. He can sense it coming, coming back, all of it coming back to them now—

Across the table Bill is cracking open his fortune cookie, and muscle memory wrenches open Stan’s mouth into a futile warning, a soundless scream.

“I’ve seen us die,” Bev says, but Stan’s eyes are on the tremble of her cigarette.

“Okay, you know what,” Richie says. 

“Wow,” Eddie says, “and you didn’t think to mention this until now? Hey guys, great to see you again, by the way we’re all going to be gruesomely murdered because I saw it happen in my dreams?”

“Look, you were here, too,” Ben says, “you remember what it was like, back then. How is any of this less believable than what happened to us that summer?”

“It’s _entirely_ unbelievable!” Eddie insists, and his fingers twitch, closing around empty air.

Bev is quiet as they argue. Stan steps up next to her. None of it makes sense, but he finds himself overcome by the need to tell her.

“Bev,” he says. “I think... I think I’ve had these dreams, too.”

Bev’s mouth drops open, eyes widening in shock. “You—you’ve seen it, too? The bathtub?”

Stan blinks. “The what?”

“The...” Bev falters. How unlike her. Standing in a bathroom: _it’s real, right?_ He looks down at himself, but can’t see the blood. “Nothing—it’s nothing. What have you seen, exactly?”

 _Nothing,_ Stan wants to echo. Nothing but vague impressions, elusive and imprecise in their nature: the strangest sense that he’s been here before. But he _has_ been here before, hasn’t he? Standing with all of them here on the streets of this town where they rode their bikes, where they ran from bullies, where Richie once dared Bill to eat a worm and Eddie threatened to throw up by the side of the road when he actually did it. Can’t he remember? How could he forget? There they are in his mind’s eye, their silhouettes shaded like photo negatives, and superimposed over the sounds of Bill retching and Eddie’s high-pitched hysterics and Richie hooting like his birthday’d come early is the encroaching blackness eating away at the details in a burning flame, is a darkness he can’t see anything past.

Then Mike and Bill come clattering into the hotel lobby, and Stan remembers something else, too, a great violent flash of it in his vision: Mike’s face tilted heavenward, his eyes glassy, throat unravelling in a delicate mesh of red. Bill floating in the water, his ribcage shattered open in his chest, his heart lovingly torn out with teeth.

“What did you see, Stan,” Bev repeats, tugging the sleeve of her jacket down over her wrist, and Stan thinks _nothing, I didn’t see anything, I didn’t see it happen, it couldn’t have happened. It was only a dream._

As though it were any of their childhood chants: repeat enough times and the blind belief will make it true.

_Where did you go, that summer,_ Mike asks, and Stan goes to the synagogue and understands instantly it’s a mistake.

As a child he always prided himself on his common sense, a trait so many of his friends seemed to lack or even—to his chagrin—actively reject. His own internal compass was reliable to a fault, meticulous as the tick of a wristwatch. But now this knowledge returns to him not in logic but in premonition. The pulse of a divining rod. It makes no sense but that of the instinctual: follow the pull of water to find the source.

It isn’t that he’s been here before. It’s that he’s been here _already._ And last time—last time, here, what did he see?

He backs away from the closed door, the leering windows, years of dust. His hand clenches in his pocket around a fistful of thin, waxy fabric. He can hear a laugh; traces it back to Patty on the couch two nights ago—was it two nights ago?—with her face lit in carnival hues from the television screen. Richie by the side of the road twenty-seven years ago, bicycle tires still spinning sideways on the ground, doubled over wheezing at Bill’s pained expression of regret. And another face, one stranger, fuzzier, slower to resurface, though certain points sharpen themselves quicker than others: the sagging droop of an eyelid, the widening of the grin, the shrill piercing peal of laughter that rings clearer and clearer like a telephone—

But the memories have pried something else loose in him, the misplaced pluck of a string. Richie. Stan’s mind stutters, repeats. The jam of the wheel, stuck putter of the engine, that infernal wad of chewed bubblegum that clings fast to the bottom of your shoe: beep beep, Richie, where are you? Where have you run, now? 

The laughter is louder than Stan remembers. He tucks the shower cap back into his pocket, safe, and starts to run.

He doesn’t make it in time.

“Richie,” Stan says, to Bev on the floor bandaging Eddie’s bloodied face. “Richie, where is he—”

“His car’s gone from the parking lot,” Ben says, shoulders hunched, eyes on Bev’s capable hands. “He must have taken off. Bill’s gone too—”

“Yeah, we’re all doing just peachy,” Eddie says, a note of barely restrained hysteria in his voice. Bev shushes him. Stan spares him a glance, his wrist cradled in his hand, and the sight strikes a chord, jarring and familiar.

“Your arm,” Stan says. A bad break. A red scrawl.

Eddie starts; Bev mutters something under her breath and grabs hold of his chin to keep him still. “It’s fine,” Eddie says, dropping his arm back in his lap. He glowers up at Stan. “I’m fine. Just got stabbed in the face by an asshole I haven’t seen in twenty-seven years, but it’s fine, everything’s great.”

A helpless desperation slowly sinks in as the rest catches up to Stan. “Richie’s run,” he says slowly. “Bill’s gone.”

“Just to the fair,” Bev says, gaze flicking up at him. “There was a kid—”

“It’s all happening again,” Stan realizes, and then self-corrects: “It’s already happened before.”

“What are you talking about?” Bev frowns. “Stan, what is it?” 

Stan looks back at her, his stare reflecting a far-off distance. “Mike,” he says, and means the name not as a question, but a finality.

It’s already happened before.

The phone is ringing shrill and clear in the edge of the blood pooling on the floor. It waits for him to do the rational thing. Pick up; answer; tell Bill to come back. Instead, Stan looks down at it and hears laughter. 

Bev lets out a loud sob. Ben drops Henry Bowers’ hunting knife from his hand and heaves a keening moan. The cellphone rings one last time and falls silent. 

Bill must be heading to Neibolt House, now; crossing the threshold alone and leaving the door ajar behind him. He’ll make it through the house and down the well, and deep in the sewers, what is it that he will see? A paper boat drifting around the bend? His own chest ripped apart, the empty cavity inside all that remains of everything he had ever once loved? Or even Stan’s thirteen-year-old face before him, lying through his teeth? _I swear, Bill. I swear._

Mike’s phone must have fallen out of his pocket in the scuffle, or else he’d already had it in hand, was preparing to make a call. Had something he still wanted to tell them. Like maybe what his artifact was, his sacrifice, the emblem of their childhood days. What he had held onto by himself all this time, in order to let it go. Because now they’ll never know and Stan should have asked. He should have asked. He would have liked to know.

“Stan,” Eddie says, his voice thinning to its breaking point, “what are you doing, Stan, what the fuck?”

Bev gapes at him from where she’s bent over Mike’s body, tears streaming down her face. “Stan, what—”

Stan ignores them. His knees hit the floor, his hands tearing at Mike’s jacket. Rifling through his pockets, turning them inside out. Nothing but his wallet and his keys and a pen and a rock and an article from this morning’s paper neatly cut and folded into a square. Nothing to give an answer; nothing to show his heart.

Stan’s hands still, poised over the body, and start to shake. 

The body. That’s it. That’s all there is. Mike’s face, patient and peaceful; his body the answer, the evidence, irrefutable in the blood that ties him down to the ground. He’s dead. He died and he’s dead, again, so that means—

“I’m dead,” Stan says, and he sinks back on his heels, a dreamlike sense of unreality filling him up, floating through his limbs. 

“Stan, what’s gotten into you—”

He hunches over Mike’s body, his knowing gaze. “I’m _dead,”_ he repeats, and the revelation is bone-numbing in the mercy it grants. The only rules he knows, the only powers he holds, are bound in life. Death is beyond his grasp, his responsibility: it would be the one and only thing that makes all of this make sense.

He can see it happening, the thread coming to its end, the yank of the chain. And as Henry’s forgotten hulking corpse sits up with a jerk of his limbs, as he turns to face Stan with his reanimated grin, lifting his meaty hands to close in around his neck, as Bev screams and Eddie hurls himself backwards and Ben lunges for the knife—Stan knows it’s already happened before. So it’s a relief to give into it now, knee deep in warm blood, fingers curling around Mike’s lifeless hand, pressing palm against palm. No need to prolong the inevitable. Only the certainty of the light, then of the dark—though the latter lasts far longer, and deeper, too: complete. 

\+ 03

The phone is ringing.

It’s evening. The lamplight is drawn tight around the living room in a cocoon of spun gold. Outside, the rain crashes down against the windows, a film blurring over the glass.

Stan looks down at his hand. There is a jigsaw piece held in his palm, its thin edge pressed into his skin, a line of phantom pain. Wings and claws and eyes. A ruby throat, red as blood.

“Honey,” Patty says, without looking up from the television screen. “Are you going to get that?”

His fist closes around the puzzle piece. He wonders—was he holding onto something else, just now?

He answers the call.

“Hi, Stan,” the voice says, well-worn over the miles, over the years. “You probably don’t remember me, but it’s—”

“Mike,” Stan says.

A pause. “Yes.” Mike sounds surprised. “It’s me. Do you know—” He gives a dry chuckle. “You’re the only one who’s remembered me straightaway, out of everyone. Can you believe that?”

Stan has his phone pressed into his ear. The skin of his cheek. It rattles in his grip, a gesture of such discomposure Patty turns her neck to stare at him from the couch.

“Honey?” Patty asks.

“It’s been twenty-seven years,” Mike is saying. “It’s time to come back. You made a promise. We all did. Are you going to keep it?”

On the table, the puzzle sits, waiting to be completed. Stan shifts his phone in his hand. Slots the final piece into place. 

“Yes,” Stan says. “I will.”

“Honey,” Patty says after he hangs up, all attention diverted from the television screen. Carnival hues and canned laughter. Something less focused to her expression than concern, less rational than alarm. It’s a pure fear, the likes of which Stan has never seen on her face before, never knew her features to be capable of holding. Hideously out of place within the warm, orderly lamplight of their living room. “Stan, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

Stan touches a hand to his face. It comes away wet.

“I don’t know,” he says. 

Outside, the shadows of the trees. Shapes and shifting things in the dark.

He lands in Derry, Maine by morning.

“Well, fuck me,” says Richie Tozier with something like reverence in his eyes. “If it isn’t Stan the Man, in the flesh.”

Stan thumbs the fold of his paper napkin. Says nothing.

“It’s funny, though,” Ben says, thoughtful. “Some of us were never even that far off from each other, but we just didn’t know how close we were, all this time.”

“And then there’s m-me,” Bill says. “Ended up all the way across the damn cuh-cuh-country from all of you.”

“As far away as you can get, really,” Mike comments. Like the thought has only just occurred to him.

“Oh, Bill,” Richie cooes, “I missed you too, I dreamed of your tenderly scruffy face every night in my sleep—”

“Beep beep, Richie,” snaps Eddie, and it only widens Richie’s grin, fuel on a burning fire.

Stan is watching them. He’s put down his chopsticks and picked up his fortune cookie, turning it over and over in his hands. He’s wondering when Bill remembered his stutter and why Bev’s laughter is a shade too harsh in its relief and what’s got Eddie rubbing at his wrist with a wince pulling at his mouth. He’s thinking that he’s been here before, that there is something important he’s forgotten, something he’s missing, though it’s all going to come back to him, any minute now. 

He’s watching them, but Mike is watching him. Stan meets his curious gaze, the question in his eyes, and cannot think of the answer as in his hands, the fortune cookie crumbles open.

“I’ve seen us die,” Bev says, and it all slots into place then, the centrepiece of the picture: he died. He’s dead. It was Mike, it was Bill, and it was him, first watching Bill’s luminous face in the darkness of the sewers, then letting Henry Bowers’ hands close around his throat in rigor mortis, his grip still warm with blood. Then it was whoever was left, Eddie and Ben and Bev, and Richie, run, or else Richie, gone, because maybe Henry got him first, maybe it was his blood Stan was wearing in a noose around his neck, all the red mixing together like the day they pressed their palms together in a circle carved by the broken edge of a bottle. It’s already happened before, and it’s going to happen again. 

Or maybe it’s another dream spun in the dark, another monster wearing the face of his worst fear: a death that doesn’t make sense. If he strains his ears he can still hear the shrill ring of laughter in the distance. Of course—he knows exactly whose doing this is. Whose web of tangled strings.

Bev is quiet. Her cigarette trembles. She must have seen him, Stan realizes. She must have seen it, too, in her dreams. So she has to know how it’s all going to end. She must have known all this time.

How many times is it going to happen, over and over again? 

_Three,_ a familiar voice whispers in his head, a nasty little shadow of a thing: once is bad luck, twice coincidence, but third time’s the charm, the pattern, the key. Third time means something, means it’s real, means it’s true. And if it’s true, then you know what’s coming next. Don’t you?

Mike and Bill are clattering into the hotel lobby, right on time. All the pieces assembling themselves into place. It’s like another puzzle to solve: Stan died, he’s dead, he knows this. But he knows something else, too: he knows what to do. 

_Where did you go, that summer,_ Mike asks, and Stan starts walking in the direction of the synagogue, then doubles back after a block and returns to the Townhouse.

He surveys Richie’s cherry red sports car in the parking lot. Circles around the building. Considers the fire escape. Enters the lobby, climbs up the stairs, and waits in the hallway, leant against the wall.

Bev gets back first. She doesn’t see him, and for some reason Stan doesn’t call out to her, make himself known. He wants to know what happens. What he’s missed. She lingers by the front desk, runs a hand through her hair, then sits down on the steps of the staircase. Lets out a loud breath. 

A few minutes later Ben walks in, pausing at the sight of her. Something shifts in his face, clear distress easing slightly into a nervous sort of tension. Hands rigid at his sides like he doesn’t know what to do with them.

“Hey,” he says, real casual. “So what’d you find, out there?”

Stan watches them the way he would watch two rare birds on a branch, but he’s seeing them at thirteen. Back when the friendship shared by the seven of them was still treacherous territory at best, though that never stopped them from leaping headstrong into the work of crossing and charting the boundaries that lay between them. What was wilderness? What was secret? What was shared ground, and how far could you follow? Quick to overextend, to trespass; quicker still to forgive. None of them could be faulted for having been stuck cooped up with their own misshapen selves too long. For being lonely. Now he watches Ben and Bev return to that delicate process, looking out at each other from two opposite banks of a river, the past twenty-seven years set adrift between them. Scanning the waters, the murky depths of time, for a stepping stone.

And now as Stan is remembering it, more and more of their past is returning to him, or more precisely, the seven of them are. The children they used to be, loud and vulgar and lovely. Stan’s own prepubescent self, gangly-limbed, stiff and scowling. Where did all of that go? That obstinate boy of his youth: when did Stan turn his back on him? When did he leave him behind?

But maybe Stan only forgot him because he forgot everyone else first, everyone who allowed him to exist at all, who made him precisely into who he was. And now that he’s back here with them, so is that boy who seems real enough to touch, should he wish. Should he extend a hand and reach out for him now.

“...and I remember a kiss,” Bev says, which is when Stan decides to clear his throat.

Both of them jump, startled, heads craning up to stare at him.

“Stan?” Bev’s face is incredulous. “What are you doing up there?” 

“Were you there the _whole time?”_ Ben furrows his eyebrows.

The door of the hotel lobby opens, then slams closed.

“Move,” Richie says, hunched over with his hands in his pockets. “I’m leaving.”

Stan straightens to attention.

“Wait, Richie,” Bev’s saying, and Ben’s coming up the stairs after him, but Richie bulldozes his way through them up the stairs and only comes to a stop when he catches sight of Stan waiting by his door. 

“What the fuck,” Richie says. “Creepy much?”

He bangs open his door and walks inside. Stan catches it before it closes. He shares a glance with Ben before they enter after Richie together.

Inside the room, Richie’s haphazardly throwing everything into the open suitcase on his bed, mouth set into a grim line.

“Richie,” Ben tries. His palms held up, placating. “Come on, we all saw some awful things out there, but we can’t let this scare us off, that’s exactly what IT wants—”

“Awful things?” Richie repeats, pausing long enough in his furious packing to bark out a sarcastic laugh. “That doesn’t even _begin_ to cover the realm of bullshit that is this town and everything in it. Why does it have to be us, anyway? Why can’t we just fuck out of here and forget about the clown and gee, I don’t know, continue being alive? It sure beats being dead!”

“We made a promise,” Ben says; wrong move. Richie’s eyes go hard and he returns to his packing. “Look—Rich. You were alone, okay?”

Richie freezes in the middle of trying to squeeze his suitcase shut around the tasteless patterned shirts spilling out from the lip. 

“You were alone,” Ben repeats, his tone excruciatingly soft, excruciatingly gentle. “But we won’t be anymore. Okay? We’ve got each other. We’ve got to have each other, or else this won’t work. This won’t ever be over.” 

Richie blinks at him. There’s a long pause, and then—

“Yeah,” Richie says, slumping down onto the bed with a sigh. “Yeah, okay. You’re right.”

Ben looks taken aback. “I am?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m staying.” 

“He’s not,” Stan says, neither soft nor gentle. “He’s just saying that to get you to leave so he can run.”

“Hey, what the fuck—”

“Let’s drop the pretenses,” Stan says, looking Richie dead in the eyes. “Listen to me. You think you’re running to save your life, but what you’re really doing is killing us. Mike is going to die, and Bill is going to die, and all of us are going to die, including you, because you can’t possibly think you’re really going to make it out of this town alive.”

“Uh, Stan?” Ben says uncertainly.

Richie is gaping at him, eyes huge behind his glasses. “What the _fuck_ is wrong with you—”

“You can tell yourself that you’re walking away to your life, but you’re not, because you can’t possibly think that IT’s ever going to let you go. Whether it happens on the road out of Derry or on the plane home or another twenty-seven years from now in your own living room—you’ll always be waiting.” Stan plunges on without stopping, without breaking eye contact, without letting him off the hook. “Don’t you think that’s worse? When all you can do is wait for it to happen, instead of putting an end to this right here, right now?”

A stunned silence follows his words. Ben is visibly shocked, having turned around to stare at him. Richie’s mouth opens and closes; Stan can see his mind flicking rapidly through every possible fitting reaction, denial or pleading or blustering outrage. But to his surprise, Richie lands on none of these. Instead, something in his face goes frighteningly blank.

“Seems to me we’re dead either way,” he says. His voice without inflection. “What does anything even matter, then? What’s the difference?”

There’s a pause as Stan stares at him. He doesn’t know what he had been expecting, but it certainly isn’t this defeated emptiness, not from Richie of all people; Richie who even when he had walked away from the group as a child had done so with a bang. A sense of defiance, middle fingers raised high. Incongruous with the Richie before him now who slumps like the past twenty-seven odd years have one by one hollowed all the air from his sails. _Just what are you scared of, Richie,_ they had asked him then; was it this? Has it come true? Is the dead-eyed Richie before him his younger self’s greatest fear?

Ben speaks up. “The difference is that we fight back. At least this way we’ll have a chance.”

Richie’s gaze slides over to Stan. 

Stan—doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t know what to say.

“Great,” Richie says, after a painful pause. “I was afraid you’d say that.” 

“So... what’s it gonna be, then?” The hope is obvious on Ben’s face. 

“Well, I’m still here, aren’t I?” Richie says, and grimaces afterward like he regrets it immediately. “Jesus. I’m gonna need a drink to get through this.”

It’s not the definite answer Stan hoped for. But it’s good enough, or it has to be. Stan nearly goes weak at the knees at the realization: they’ve done it, they’ve stopped Richie from running. They’re still seven. They’re seven, against whatever happens next. 

What happens next?

From next door, through the wall, there’s the sound of a scramble, a shout.

Stan’s blood runs cold as the bite of a hunting knife. “Eddie,” he says, and watches Richie’s face turn white. “Eddie,” he says, again, and runs.

Eddie has a knife sticking out of his face and Henry Bowers in his bathroom when Stan bursts in. They turn to stare at him, expressions frozen in such identical shock that Stan half-expects a laugh track to follow. He remembers Patty, then, their kiss goodbye at the door. Remembers a synagogue full of strangers’ faces staring, seeing him for the very first time. Remembers his thirteen-year-old self, stubborn and stupid and brave, and sweeps into the bathroom with the others hot on his heels, floating on the momentum of his victory in stopping Richie from running, so when he lunges for Henry he doesn’t see his meaty hands coming up to close in around his neck and squeeze. 

\+ 04 

The phone is ringing.

It’s evening. The lamplight is drawn tight around the living room in a cocoon of spun gold. Outside, the rain is crashing down against the windows. 

Stan presses his phone against his ear. The skin of his cheek. A jigsaw piece in his hand.

“You made a promise,” Mike says. “We all did. Are you going to keep it?”

On the television, a studio audience is laughing. Over on the couch, Patty laughs with them.

Stan squints closer through the blurry film of water over the window glass. Thinks he can make out something through the formless shadows, the muddied colours: shapes and shifting things in the dark.

“Yes,” Stan says, “I am,” and slots the final piece into place at the centre of the puzzle.

He lands in Derry, Maine by morning. 

“Well, fuck me,” says Richie Tozier with something like reverence in his eyes. “If it isn’t Stan the Man, in the flesh.”

“Where else would I be?” Stan says, quiet as an echo.

“It’s funny, though,” Ben says. “Some of us were never even that far off from each other, but we just didn’t know how close we were, all this time.”

“And then there’s m-me,” Bill says. “Ended up all the way across the damn cuh-cuh-country from all of you.”

“As far away as you can get, really,” Mike comments. 

“Oh, Bill,” Richie cooes, “I missed you too, I dreamed of your tenderly scruffy face every night in my sleep—”

“Beep beep, Richie,” snaps Eddie, and it only widens Richie’s grin, pleased stupid. Fuel on a long-burning fire.

Mike is watching Stan. A question in his eyes. “Tell us about you, Stan, how have you been?”

Stan turns his fortune cookie over and over. It’s strange. He thinks—he almost cannot remember. At least until the cookie crumbles open, and it all comes back to him then, the ugly clawing thing in his hands, jaw gaping open to shriek a shrill, triumphant laugh. 

“You’ve seen us die,” Stan says, and watches the widening of Bev’s eyes in shock. “I need to know how it happens. I need to know.”

“Stan, dude, what the fuck are you talking about,” Richie says, “this is crazy. This is crazy, right, guys?” Nobody answers him.

“How did you know that?” Bev’s cigarette trembles. “How could you possibly have known that?”

“Hold on,” Eddie says, knuckles growing white around the handle of his suitcase, “you’ve been having _death visions_ and you didn’t think to mention this until now? Hey guys, great to see you again, by the way we’re all going to be gruesomely murdered because I saw it happen in my dreams?”

“You’ve seen it, too?” Bev says, still not taking her eyes off Stan, something desperate in her expression: _it’s real, right?_ “The bathtub?”

Stan hesitates. “What bathtub?”

Bev falters. How unlike her, Stan had thought. But maybe he had been thinking of the thirteen-year-old girl, and not the woman before him who laughs at jokes like there’s a catch. Her hand hovers over her mouth in horror, and the sleeve of her jacket slips down, revealing the tip of a blackened bruise on the skin of her wrist. 

“The bathtub,” Stan repeats. “Who was it? How does it happen?”

Bev stares at him. There are tears in her eyes. Stan feels himself taking a step back, because he doesn’t know what this means. He doesn’t know—

“Hey,” Ben says, low and cautious, “that’s enough.” 

“This is _crazy,”_ Richie’s still saying, “so what, we’re all gonna die? What the fuck?”

Mike and Bill are clattering into the hotel lobby. Stan thinks: four. Thinks he died, he’s dead. But he just doesn’t have all the pieces. Turns out he doesn’t know anything at all. 

“Where did you go, that summer?” Mike asks.

The others slowly make their way back to town, picking their way through the undergrowth, silent. Already lost in the haze of memories that make up the summer they left behind. 

Stan stays rooted where he is, standing in the woods with the clubhouse under his feet, their secret hideaway carved out of the ground. 

“Stan,” Mike says. He hasn’t moved, either. “You found your artifact already, didn’t you?”

Stan nods. Pulls a fistful of waxy thin fabric out from his pocket. The sight of it brings a smile to Mike’s face.

“Good,” Mike says. “That’s a good choice.”

“You’ve found yours, too.” It isn’t a question.

Mike looks faintly surprised. “Yeah. I’ve had more time than the rest of you to figure it out, haven’t I?”

Stan swallows. His voice is raw. “What was it?”

Mike raises an eyebrow. “Was?”

Stan clears his throat, dry and aching. “Look—can you tell me? I want to—I would really like to know.”

“Okay, okay,” Mike says, and he reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out—

Stan stares.

“It’s a rock,” says Mike. 

“I can see that,” says Stan hoarsely.

“I mean, it’s a rock from the river. One of the rocks we used, that summer, do you remember? I don’t know if you remember.”

Oh, Stan remembers. “Henry Bowers.”

Mike grins. “In a way, I still think that was the craziest thing we did all summer. Forget the clown, forget Neibolt—can you believe we faced down the Bowers Gang and won?”

He laughs, and Stan watches spellbound the ripple of his throat, skin bared smooth and bloodless. Long enough after the laughter ends for Mike to say, slowly: “Stan?”

“Yeah?”

“Stan,” Mike says, something very careful to the cadence of his voice. “Just what is it that you remember?”

What is it he remembers? He remembers the river, remembers scooping up the rocks even as they scraped up his palms, remembers Ben’s guttural roar and Richie’s screeching laughter and Bev hurling her arm back with a vicious precision that cut clear through all of their clumsy, frantic commotion. A steady hand. Her aim true. He remembers the exhilaration afterward, how it mellowed into a golden afternoon calm as they trekked back to town through the tall grass and wildflower fields, back into the normalcy of summer for what was to be the last time. Most of all, though, he remembers the urgent rush of the moment, like they’d been called into some sort of action, tapped into a power they had to rise and meet or else it would forever pass them by, and that power was the seven of them together.

“Some things are still missing,” Stan says evasively; it’s the truth, just not all of it. “I know they are—it’s not quite complete yet, in my mind. But I’m remembering more and more of everything, the longer I’m here.” 

“Hm.” Mike’s watching him closely. “You know, I’ve been waiting for all of you to come back for so long, and everyone else is more or less what I’d expected. But you’ve been... It’s strange.” 

Stan can see him weighing his words; whether or not they should be said. “What?”

“Out of everyone, I was the most worried about you.” Mike hefts the stone in his hand. “That day—you were so angry. I still remember it so clearly, because it was the first time I ever saw you get angry.” 

“What day?” Stan says, confused.

“The day we fought IT. The day we made the promise to come back. And to be honest, when I made the calls...” Mike hesitates. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to.” 

Anger? Was it anger? Stan finds himself bewildered, even as it returns to him all at once—anger, and laughter, and the bubbling relief of tension melting away under the afternoon sun. And how easily that bitterness had gotten buried under the years, until he had forgotten that he had once bled, that he had once thrown stones by the river, that he had once loved and hated his friends in equal measure. Had he remembered—had he remembered, _would_ he have come back? 

Does it even matter? Didn’t he come back, and come back, and come back again? Isn’t he here now, dead as he is, looking another dead man in the eyes?

“Where else would I have gone?” Stan says. It’s the same response he’s always given Richie at the Jade of the Orient; he says it now with the same lilting tone, the delicate irony he would give a lighthearted joke. But here, above the clubhouse, deep in the solitude of the woods, his humour lands differently. Stumbles, as though by accident, upon something honest.

Mike’s eyes are serious. “I don’t know. That’s what scares me.”

“Mike,” Stan says, as firmly as he can. “I’m here.” 

But Mike still doesn’t look satisfied.

Stan’s out of time; he has a runner to rescue. He turns away from Mike’s gaze, and it follows him as he leaves, like the patient stare of someone who has waited for a very long time, and only has longer still to go. 

“I’m leaving,” Richie says, and Stan says, “No, you’re not,” and Ben glances between the two of them with a nervous look on his face.

“Come on, guys, we can work this out,” he tries, palms held up placatingly. 

Richie glares at Stan.

Stan wonders when Henry Bowers is gonna bust into Eddie’s bathroom with his daddy’s hunting knife. 

“When you run,” Stan says, with the air of a long-suffering schoolteacher trying to prove a theorem in as plain terms as possible, “everyone is going to die. Mike’s going to die, and Bill, and who does that leave—Eddie in the next room, Ben and Bev, and you, on your way out of town or on the plane home or twenty-seven years from now in your living room. It doesn’t matter. One way or another IT’s going to get you, because you can’t think that once you leave, any of us are going to live. You can’t really believe that IT’s going to let you go.”

Of course, the clearer Stan ever tries to explain something, the less Richie listens. “Thanks, but I’ll take my chances away from here. We can’t fight IT on its own home turf, are you kidding me? It’s suicide.”

“Isn’t it our home, too?” 

Richie freezes, fingers clenching around the fistful of shirt he’s cramming into his suitcase. His eyes go hard.

“Funny. I don’t recall you having much trouble with leaving it either, the first time.”

“I came back, didn’t I?” Stan says, and is surprised to find it comes out harsher than he intends, as though Richie’s struck a nerve Stan didn’t even know existed. “I came back—”

“Guys,” Ben interrupts. “This isn’t helping anything.”

It isn’t—but maybe it doesn’t have to. Maybe Stan doesn’t have to convince Richie of anything. Maybe all he needs to do is stall. Draw out the argument, feed into the fight, just long enough for Richie to see for himself. Just until—

From next door, through the wall, there’s a scramble, a shout.

“I think we should go,” Stan says, and runs.

Eddie has a knife sticking out of his face and Henry Bowers in his bathroom when Stan bursts in. They turn to stare at him in identical expressions of shock frozen on their faces. Stan keeps perfectly still. No sudden moves, now; just hold them here, stuck on their strings for as long as he can, until the cavalry arrives. When Richie and Ben get here they’ll be four against one, and it’ll almost be like that time by the river, their fighting days. He wishes he had a rock. Instead he has to settle for standing his ground. 

“Henry,” he says, voice tight. As though a greeting. 

Eddie gapes at him. Stan knows that particular look very well; used to see it directed at Richie all the time. He elects to ignore it.

“Uris,” Henry says, face twisting into a sneer. Cruel delight carving the features of his face. “So glad you could make it.” He wheezes a grating laugh that sends a chill down Stan’s spine, and takes a step forward, raising his meaty fists—

The knife is somehow out of Eddie’s cheek and in his hand. How’d that happen—? “Get away from me, fuckface,” Eddie says, and plunges the knife into Henry’s gut with a sickening squelch. Stan jerks back, into Richie, who’s just come skidding into the room and lets out a choked-sounding noise, either at the sight of Eddie stabbing Henry or at Stan stepping on his foot. More commotion; somewhere behind him, Bev screams. 

Henry’s still laughing, even as blood gurgles from his mouth. “See you later, Losers,” he says, lifting his hand in a mocking wave, and all of them can only stare as he climbs out of the bathroom window with the knife sticking straight out of his chest and disappears. 

The rev of a car starting. A squeal of tires. 

“Holy shit,” Eddie says, and collapses.

Richie and Bev race forward into the cramped bathroom to catch him. Ben runs for the open window and stares outside, face disbelieving. Stan thinks distantly that maybe next time he should look into getting a weapon.

“Are you crazy?” Richie says, hands fluttering around Eddie’s bloodied face—“OW, that fucking hurts, asshole!”—but he’s grinning like he can’t believe his eyes. “Did you just stab goddamn Henry Bowers with a knife from you pulled out of your own face? What the fuck is wrong with you—”

“Shut up, Richie,” says Bev. She turns to the rest of them, hands braced around Eddie’s shoulders. “We need to get him out of here, give him more room to breathe. We’ll need gauze, a lot of it—”

“He’s going after Mike,” Stan says, and all the babbling falls silent as they stare at him. “He’ll be going to the library to kill Mike, now that he knows we’re all here and Mike’s all alone there.” He remembers something else. “Bill—where’s Bill, exactly?”

“There was a kid,” Bev says, and Stan closes his eyes. Of course. They keep slipping out of his grasp like sand.

“I have to go to the library,” Stan says. “Now.”

“Are you serious?” Richie says. “That was Henry motherfucking Bowers and he almost just _killed_ Eds, so maybe take a moment to stop freaking the hell out of everybody—”

Maybe it’s the adrenaline, the excitement, but how curious: here and now, Richie looks just as alive as Stan remembers him. 

“Eddie, you’re going to be fine,” Stan says, and Eddie stares up at him from the ground, blood leaking all over his face. Cradling his uninjured wrist in his hand. “You’re going to survive this, I swear. But Mike won’t, unless I get to him right now. I have to go.”

Richie gawks openmouthed at him. Eddie’s probably still in shock, his expression uncomprehending. But Bev—Stan meets Bev’s gaze, recognizes the clarity in the pale blue of her eyes. The blood they can both see. 

“Go,” she says, “we’ve got it handled here.”

Stan nods, and turns to leave the bathroom, when a hand latches onto his sleeve.

“I’m coming with you,” says Ben, and his voice brooks no argument. 

Stan hesitates. Remembers the clatter of a knife on the floor. Maybe it was meant to be anyway. “Okay,” he says, and they go. 

In the library, the lights are off. The stacks empty, shelves silent. 

Stan walks without having to look while Ben fumbles after him in the dark. “Stan, wait,” Ben whispers, but there’s no time. Stan can hear a distant thump, a muffled groan, and he follows that sound as though an anchor reeling him in. In the near distance he can make out two figures grappling on the ground, one hulking, one hidden.

Ben inhales sharply at the sight of them. Stan looks down at the ground for the silver-eyed glint but can’t find it, and he realizes with his heart in his throat that at this time, the knife is still in its owner’s hand, poised at the skin of the throat. Unable to be used against him. Stan desperately scans their surroundings for something else—anything.

Ben moves, beside him. Crouches down among the debris of wrecked displays and picks something up from the scattered pieces of glass. A heavy shape with its own blunted blade.

“Ben?” Stan whispers, and no sooner is the name out of his mouth than is Ben following through with the action: three short steps closer, raise of the arm, downward arc of the axe through the air and into the bone of Henry Bowers’ skull. 

Henry goes still, strings cut. He falls with a bodily thud, axe buried in the back of his head. Stan eyes his facedown form on the ground; he knows better. He’s watched him rise up with an executioner’s smile. But he stays unmoving for long enough that Stan finally lets out his breath. 

Mike chokes and coughs, struggling to sit up.

“Mike,” Ben gasps, and he’s there by his side, dropping the axe. His broad hands at his shoulders, the small of his back. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Mike says, “he didn’t—I’m fine. Are you?”

“I’m fine,” Ben says back, but he’s staring down at Henry’s bloodied body, his chest heaving, face disbelieving. 

Mike coughs again. Glances up, then, and catches sight of Stan. An odd expression comes over his face. “Stan? What’s the matter?”

The doors of the library bang open; Bev and Eddie and Richie, judging by the noise, finally coming to join them. Stan doesn’t look in their direction. He’s staring back at Mike, taking in the sight. Flecks of blood on his face, breath heaving, sweat at his brow. Swallow of his Adam’s apple at his throat. He’s alive, and all the million other things that are wrong with this world suddenly don’t matter anymore, because this is the one and only truth Stan has room in him to understand: this face before him, belonging to one of his oldest, dearest friends, rising up out of the dark to say Stan’s name one more time. To pull him back into the circle with a phone call in the evening, a promise paid.

“I told you I’d keep it,” Stan says, and he starts to laugh, like he did in a field of tall grass twenty-seven years ago: relief and triumph and anger in the same bitter breath. 

“Hold on,” says Mike. “Where’s Bill?”

From the ground, his phone starts to ring. 

The windows of Neibolt House are cracked in. Shards of broken glass litter the front walk, the yard strangled with weeds. Bill Denbrough stands alone at the door, one foot over the threshold, just on the verge of stepping inside. He mirrors exactly his teenage self from twenty-seven years ago, down to the distinct guilt in his eyes at having gotten caught in the act. 

“You guh-guh-gotta let me end this,” Bill says, but he doesn’t appear to be speaking to the six of them, his gaze clouded with distance. “It has to be m-m-me. I’m the one who started all of this; it’s my f-f-f-fault. I can’t ask you to do this.”

The others make short work of putting out his self-flagellating fire.

“Well, we’re not asking,” says Bev, picking up a wrought-iron fence spike from the ground.

“Losers stick together,” says Ben.

“Let’s kill this fucking clown,” says Richie, who seems to have found his resolve somewhere along the way.

Bill gives in with a tense smile, a strained sort of relief that burdens more than it releases. The misplaced responsibility of an older brother with no hand left to hold. Now the seven of them stare at one another, standing in a makeshift circle on the front steps of the house. If they joined hands, Stan thinks, would the scars of their palms still find each other?

This is it, the only certain thing. They’re all in place. This is the time. This is the right way it was meant to happen, and it’s finally upon them, now.

The door is beckoning.

Inside, Ben screams in agony as letters carve themselves into the skin of his stomach. Bev swings the iron spike into the reflection’s grinning face and shatters it into pieces. Stan pounds on the closed door of the next room, his fists hammering into the wood, and when it finally swings open he finds Bill straining to keep the severed spiderlike head from sinking its teeth into Richie’s face, screaming—“EDDIE, THE KNIFE!”

Later, after Ben’s stabbed the head clean through and Bill’s thrown it out of the room, he turns on Eddie. “He could’ve duh-duh- _died,”_ Bill shouts. “Do you want that? Georgie’s dead, the kid’s dead—you want Richie dead, too?”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says, hunched over in the corner of the room. “I was just scared.”

Bev and Ben are on either side of Richie, their hands in his, hoisting him up to his knees. Richie’s glasses are cracked, fallen on the floor; his body lists to one side, breath coming in sharp ragged gasps. Stan thinks back to the head that had attacked him, with spindly legs and boyish blond curls and the cruel laughter of a child, and tries to place its face. He doesn’t remember. But Richie does—Richie must, his face white as a ghost that’s passed him by. 

“Richie,” Stan says, because he needs to know, but also because he’s curious. “Who was that?”

Richie flinches away from Bev’s open hand, Ben’s sturdy arm. “How the hell should I know,” he says, voice strangled. “What does it matter to you, anyway?” 

His face seems peculiarly bared without his glasses. Mike bends forward to pick them up off the floor. He wipes the lenses with the sleeve of his shirt and offers them back to Richie in a wordlessly gentle gesture.

“Thanks,” Richie mutters.

Everyone averts their gaze while he’s putting them back on his face for some reason, more than they even would for him getting changed into his clothes. Everyone except Stan. His stare burning, wondering. He needs to know.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says again, after a while, voice small. Like an afterthought.

They make it through the house; they make it down the well. They even get through the sewers to the cistern before Eddie finally freezes, his fear catching up to him at last as he stares down the hole through which Mike’s gone on ahead of them. “I can’t,” he says, all rushed out in a single breath like he’s only been waiting to say it all this time. “I can’t do it, I can’t go any further, I can’t. You let me go down there with you, I’m gonna get us all killed.” He squeezes his eyes shut and lifts his inhaler to his mouth, and Richie swats it back down. 

“You stabbed Henry with a knife you pulled out of your own face,” Richie says, matter-of-fact, even fond. Sincerity is a strange look on him. “You’re braver than you think.”

Eddie blinks back at him. “Oh,” he says, like, _you really think so?_

“Yeah, Eds.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Okay. Yeah. Yeah, okay, I know, I just—forgot,” Eddie says inanely, a pained expression on his face like he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about himself, but Stan does. He knows it exactly, that clear-running logic: _I forgot who I am, because I forgot who you were, and because I forgot the person I was when I was with you._ But all of that is over with. They’re together, the seven of them, and this is the last time. 

“Here,” Bev says, handing Eddie the iron spike. “Take it. It kills monsters.”

Eddie eyes it dubiously. “Does it?”

“Yeah,” Bev says. She blows a strand of sweaty hair out of her face. “If you believe it does.”

And maybe it really is as simple as that. Simple as the last seven relics of their childhood burning up deep underground. A sacrifice, Mike had called it, and Stan feels keenly their loss as the waxy, flower-patterned fabric chars black in the fire; the surrender of the only thing that had remained of him here, that proved his presence, that made him real. Here are all their secret things, their fiercely guarded fears and wants and sorrows turned over at last. Here is the torch Ben has been bravely carrying for twenty-seven years, here is the crutch Eddie lets go of like a limb, here is the regret Bill has folded up and preserved careful as a paper boat now released to the tide. Bev reads out a child’s painstaking script, the words she knows by heart; here is love. Mike casts the rock that had brought the seven of them together; here is love. Richie flips an arcade token into the fire like a coin into a fountain, as though making a wish. His face drawn in shadow. Here is—?

Slowly, they join hands in a circle, and as they mourn what they’ve lost, the lights come dancing down to flicker gold over their faces in the dark, illuminating what they once knew. What they’ve forgotten. What they remember. 

_Just what is it that you remember,_ Mike’s voice echoes in his head, and from beneath the lid of the jar, a red balloon begins to swell. 

There is running. It was stumbling, at first, out of the crown of jagged rock and away from the laughter filling up the cave like helium, grabbing onto any part of each other they could reach, sleeves and arms and hands, as though to remind themselves that they were there, they were together. But worse than the shock and the nameless panic is when Stan had looked at Mike and seen the guilt written clear on his face, no answer to be found there. There was never a plan; there was never a purpose. No bigger picture to be formed. Only the fear that swallows up everything else, everything but the need to run. So he runs. He runs with the others lost to the winds, down into the depths of the caves, and the door slams shut behind him.

He clatters to an abrupt stop. In the sudden absence of noise his heart pounds loud enough to hear. This isn’t real, he reminds himself—this can’t be real.

He looks up anyway.

He’s standing at the podium in the synagogue. The lights are on. The pews are crowded full. The faces of the audience are vague and unfamiliar and expectant. A microphone is in his hands.

“Go on,” says the thing that isn’t really his father, standing by his side; Stan knows it isn’t, because it’s smiling. “Go on, Stanley. Go on and speak.”

Stan tightens his grip around the microphone. Scans the audience, the rows of faces, for the one he remembers. But he can’t find him—he isn’t here. 

“What’s the matter?” his not-father prompts. “Say your words, Stanley, your precious words. Didn’t you have so much to say?”

Stan opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.

“Today you’re supposed to become a man,” his not-father booms, its smile widening into something loose and delighted, “but you can’t even remember what you have to say, can you? Go on, Stanley—what does it mean to change, to transform? Just what are those pieces of you that it feels the easiest to lose?”

The faces in the audience are all blurring together. Elongating and twisting into some abstract smear of a painter’s brushstroke. There is dust on the podium, in the air; the lights flicker out, cobwebs unravelling from the lofty ceilings. The building has stood hollow for years.

“Stanley, boy,” his not-father croons, mouth stretching like rubber, “what’s gotten into you? You always used to be so scared, but now...”

It reaches out a finger, and Stan is rooted to the spot, watching it crook into a talon that runs over the skin of his cheek. The movement is almost a caress, but not quite.

“Now you’re even _more,”_ IT says.

Stan runs his tongue over his teeth. Swallows. Opens his mouth. It takes everything not to scream. To find his voice and croak:

“It’s you. You’re doing this to me. I died, I’m already dead, so why won’t you let it _stop?”_

And IT—freezes. Head cocking to the side, peering at him intently. No longer the brown-eyed gaze of his father.

“Me?” IT repeats, tone torn between curiosity and glee. “Oh, but I’m not doing anything, Stan—this is all on you. This is all _your_ fear. Your fault. You’re the one who left _me,_ Stan, you left, so now it’s only fair that we’re losing you!”

Its talon is sharpening, curved claw digging into the skin of Stan’s cheek and drawing blood, but he’s beyond matters of the body at this point. Rattled instead by the most absolute horror of all: that none of this is happening for a reason, not even one of a monster’s machinations spun up in a web. IT isn’t doing this to him, so there’s no solution that can be given, no end. Which means, finally, the arrival of the answer: it isn’t that there’s no way out but through.

There’s no way out at all.

Stan pries his gaze away with the last of his will, every nerve stuck screaming at the wrongness of the reality that’s happening to him, his skin on fire, his palms itching. He turns back to the audience to scan the rows for the familiar face he’s looking for. Any of them—anyone. But the pews are empty. A fine layer of dust sits over everything, patient and complete.

“Oh, but Stan,” IT whispers, breath old and rotting against his cheek, and Stan already knows what it’s going to say: “They left you. They _left_ you. You remember that. Don’t you?”

And Stan would answer, but it doesn’t matter, and there’s no chance, anyway; the mouth is splitting open on his father’s face, rows of teeth parting to expose the light, and the nothingness it grants. 

\+ 05

The phone is ringing.

It’s evening. Rain crashes down against the windows. The lamplight is a cocoon of living gold.

There is something Stan cannot remember. He remembers this.

“You made a promise,” Mike is saying. “We all did. Are you going to keep it?”

“You left me,” Stan says.

On the television, a studio audience is laughing. Patty is laughing.

There’s a long pause over the line. “What?”

Through the window, there is something in the shadows. Shapes and shifting things in the dark.

“Yes, I will,” Stan says, and when he closes his fist a prick of pain reminds him of the jigsaw piece in his hand. He stares down at it. After a moment’s thought he slots it into place at the centre of the puzzle, complete.

He packs a bag: change of clothes, toiletries, shaving kit. Pauses for a moment with the razor balanced in his hand. Hefting the weight of it in his palm, looking down at the shine of its straight edge, remembering what it feels like to wield a blade with intent. 

He lands in Derry, Maine by morning.

“Well, fuck me,” says Richie Tozier with something like reverence in his eyes. “If it isn’t Stan the Man, in the flesh.”

Stan rips at the corner of his paper napkin.

“It’s funny, though,” Ben says. “Some of us were never even that far off from each other, but we just didn’t know how close we were, all this time.”

“And then there’s Bill,” Stan says.

Bill startles. “Yeah—ended up all the way across the damn cuh-cuh-country from all of you.”

“As far away as you can get, really,” Stan says. Across the table, Mike glances at him sharply, the swift turn of a falcon’s head.

“Oh, Bill,” Richie cooes, simpering with a hand clasped to his chest, “I missed you too, I dreamed of your tenderly scruffy face every night in my sleep—”

“Beep beep, Richie,” Eddie and Stan say in perfect unison, and Richie’s grin is startled, stupid, pleased.

“Stan,” says Mike. His eyes on him still. The question there. “Stan, what about you? How have you been?”

Stan holds the fortune cookie in the palm of his hand. Thinks of the word for what he is feeling: anger, a heat slow and simmering, the likes of which he has not remembered in years. Oh, yes, it’s all coming back to him now, and he crushes the fortune cookie open in his fist.

“I’m heading back to the Townhouse,” says Bev. “You coming?”

“Yeah,” says Ben, already following after her across the parking lot, a shrug to his shoulders.

Stan stays where he is. Bev slows a little, turning to tilt her head at him. “Stan?” 

Stan looks at her. Sees her with tears in her eyes. _I’ve seen us die._

So has he. What does it matter? 

“Stan?” Bev repeats. She’s fumbling with a cigarette, trying to light it; as she does, her hands tremble, and the sleeve of her jacket slips down, revealing the tip of a blackened bruise on the skin of her wrist. She pays it no attention, like she knows it is supposed to hurt. Like she can no longer see the blood when she looks into the bathroom mirror. 

That bruise, Stan observes; it’s in the distinct shape of a hand. A crushing grip. 

Bev’s mouth flattens when Stan doesn’t answer. Her face tightens with worry, but with frustration, too. Still, she allows him his choice.

“All right,” she says, and she’s off, Ben at her side. Richie and Eddie are already long gone, a distant squeal of the accelerator against asphalt. It’s only Stan, now, and Bill. The two of them staring down Mike next to the lion-headed statues outside the Jade of the Orient. Washed in neon technicolour. Carnival hues. 

“Let me show you something,” Mike says. “Please. Just this one thing. I just need to show you this one thing, and then you’ll understand.”

The arch of Bill’s brow is skeptical, but his expression is soft; he wants to cave in, to believe the story Mike is selling. _If you believe it does,_ Bev had said, last time, the time that was supposed to be the last time, the time they were supposed to win because they were together.

Stan jams his hands into his pockets, leans back slightly, shoulders squared. Looks Mike in the eye.

“You’d better,” he says.

Later, slumped against the wall with smoke in his lungs and tears streaming down his face, choking and coughing, Stan watches Mike jab his finger in triumph. “I knew you would see it,” he says, “I _knew_ it.”

“I saw the whole fucking thing,” Bill gasps, lurching forward from where he’s sprawled clumsily across piles of books on the floor to fist his hand in the front of Mike’s shirt, their foreheads knocking together. “I saw it.”

“No, we didn’t,” Stan says, and they turn to stare at him, like they’ve only just remembered he’s there, too.

“What?” Bill’s brow furrows. 

“We didn’t,” Stan repeats, struggling to get the words out through clean breaths of air. His chest aches. “We didn’t see the whole thing, did we, Mike?”

“Stan, what are you—”

“So what happened to them after the ritual?” Stan says, and Mike falls abruptly silent. “What happened to them, Mike?” His throat feels scraped raw; rough. “Did it work?”

“Mike?” Bill says slowly, his gaze flicking between them. “What’s he tuh-tuh-talking about?”

“It’s going to be different with us,” Mike says, his voice level, even reasonable. “It’s going to be different, this time—”

“How?” Stan wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. “How, exactly, is it going to be different with us, Mike? What, with your rock?”

Mike goes still. “How did you know about the rock?”

Stan leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. _You told me, Mike. You told me._

There is a long pause in which no one says anything at all.

“Stan, I’ve _found_ the answer,” Mike says eventually. “I spent all these years here in Derry looking for the answer and I’ve found it. I’ve done the research, I looked everywhere and I never stopped looking, and this is all we have against It. This is all there is. I’m not crazy.” 

Stan opens his eyes again. Mike is breathing heavily; he looks like he didn’t mean for that last sentence to slip out. He looks hurt.

“No,” Stan says. “No, Mike, you’re not crazy. You’re just wrong.”

“You don’t know that. Look, we did it twenty-seven years ago without anything at all, we were only kids and we could do it because we believed we could. Now we have the advantage. We have this ritual and all we have to do is just believe in it again, believe in the heart of everything we know to be true like we believed when we were thirteen years old that summer—”

“What is there to believe in, Mike?” Stan’s hands are shaking. He busies them with straightening out the collar of his shirt. “It’s been twenty-seven years. We’re not thirteen anymore. I don’t—I don’t know if we’re even still _friends.”_

Mike’s mouth opens and closes. Standing there in the dim firelight, he looks flimsy enough to see straight through. Just blow and the pieces of him would scatter, like pages torn from a book. 

“Of course we are,” says Bill. 

Stan stiffens. He’s heard that tone of voice before. Seen that expression on his face, closing over into certainty, the slow dawning of an idea being spoken to life. That first chill of the summer when they stood listening to him on their bikes in the open street. Standing on the threshold of a new world, clustered around him at the broken-in front door of Neibolt House. The splintering glass of a bottle. _Swear it, Stan. Do you swear?_

“Stan, we have to try,” Bill says. Gathering steam as he goes. “Mike’s right—we have to buh-buh-believe. Otherwise we’ve got n-nothing else. And we’re not thirteen years old anymore but we owe it to them, to those people we once were. Who fought and would’ve died for each other. Who made a promise to each other.” A pause, as though he is only just realizing it himself. “We owe it to them. Don’t we?”

It’s all happening again. It’s already happened before. 

“Stan,” Mike says, careful. “Just what is it that you remember?”

Stan smiles. Thin as the crooked scars on his palms.

“Everything,” he says. “I remember everything.”

“I’m leaving,” Richie says. 

“Come on, Richie,” Ben tries. Palms held up placatingly.

“Why?” Stan asks.

Richie pauses in the middle of cramming the lid of his suitcase closed. “Why?” he repeats, eyes manic behind his glasses. “Have you been paying any attention at all to what’s going on around here—”

“It isn’t as though it matters,” Stan says. “You can’t.”

Richie barks a laugh. “Oh, what, are you gonna stop me? _You?_ I’d like to see you try, asshole. I’d like to see what you’ve got up your sleeve—”

“You can’t leave here. None of us can. We can never leave here.” Only as he is saying it aloud does he finally understands its truth. “We’re stuck here, and we’re going to be stuck here over and over and over again. It’s never going to end.”

Richie blinks at him. “What?” 

“And it’s always going to end the same way. It doesn’t matter if you run or not, Richie, it doesn’t matter if we save Mike, and Bill, and everyone, because no matter what, it’s always going to end the same way. All of you are going to die.”

“Stan, what on earth—” Ben begins.

“I thought I was here for a purpose. I thought I knew how this was supposed to go. But I don’t, do I?” Bev with tears in her eyes, Richie with an arcade token in his hand, the shaken look on Bill’s face at whatever horror he had seen without them. Succumbing to the pull of Neibolt House, leaving them behind. “So I just want to know—tell me, why _are_ you running, Richie? Why do you always run? What’s got you so spooked?”

“Stan, this isn’t funny,” Ben’s saying, “whatever you’re talking about, this isn’t like you at all.”

“Just what are you so scared of, Richie,” Stan says, and he’s holding Richie’s gaze, certain he’s going to get him to crack—

“All of _us?”_ Richie says slowly.

“What?”

“You said, ‘all of you are going to die.’” Richie uses air quotes and everything. He straightens up, letting go of the suitcase on the bed. “As in all of _us._ What’s that supposed to mean? What about you?”

Stan stares at him.

Richie narrows his eyes.

“What the fuck aren’t you letting us in on, Stan?”

The silence a gulf between them, widening with every second that passes. But it can’t be helped. It can’t be crossed. Stan doesn’t know how to tell him. 

He doesn’t have to. From next door, through the wall, there’s a scramble, a shout. 

Eddie has a knife sticking out of his face and Henry Bowers in his bathroom when Stan bursts in. They turn to stare at him with identical expressions of shock frozen on their faces, so it’s remarkably easy, simple even, to reach into his shirt pocket and pull out the straight razor he’d been keeping there, flick the blade outward and drive it into Henry’s throat in a line clean and straight as the drag of pen over paper.

Somebody screams behind him, commotion thundering into the room. Henry looks at Stan. Stan looks back.

Henry starts to laugh, a low, grating noise like scraping metal.

Stan lets go of the razor. The handle bobs from where the blade is stuck in Henry’s jugular. A surge of blood is seeping out from the cut, and Stan feels a sharp echo of phantom pain in his hands.

Henry’s laughter is beginning to turn into something else, guttural and choking. He drops bodily to his knees; Eddie flinches back, and Richie’s hand shoots up to steady him. Stan doesn’t look at them. He keeps his eyes on the hulking corpse of Henry Bowers as it sinks down onto the bathroom floor, watching for the jerk of the limbs, the reanimated grin, the meaty hands lunging to close in around his neck and squeeze. 

He doesn’t do any of those things. Only croaks through a mouthful of blood, “See you later, Losers,” and goes still. 

“Holy fuck, dude,” Richie says.

Eddie makes a muffled sort of noise and collapses. Richie swears and scrambles to catch him, Bev racing forward on his other side. Ben is standing by Henry’s body, staring down at it with his hands clenching at his sides, face disbelieving. 

“Gauze,” Bev is saying, “we need gauze, we need to get that knife out—”

“Holy shit, does that like, hurt,” Richie is saying, hands fluttering around Eddie’s bloodied face.

“OF COURSE IT DOES, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE—”

“Stan,” Ben says. “Stan, are you all right?”

Stan is thinking he should have done this ages ago, all quickness and efficiency and twist of the knife. He’s thinking maybe this was the way all along. Maybe there really is a way to save everybody.

“Where, exactly, did Bill say he was going?”

There’s blood drying on his hands, flecked onto his sleeves. The taxi driver doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. Still, Stan finds himself folding over the cuffs to hide the stains. An old sentiment that almost makes him feel like himself again.

Ben is with him in the backseat. “I’m coming with you,” he had said earlier, voice brooking no argument. He’s been watching Stan in the rearview mirror for most of the ride, trying to be discreet, but now his gaze has turned outward through the windows at the passing streets of their childhood town, brow furrowed as though troubled or fascinated by the sight. Is it how you remember? Stan thinks of asking, but he already knows the answer. Derry has a way of doing that, eating through the years, sinking its teeth into them once again. It’s the same way as how Stan knows, logically, that nothing can hurt him now, but beneath the thin layer of that logic he feels like he did when he was shivering in the grey water of the sewers as a child, staring down the darkness for the first time. Knowing exactly what was going to happen when he entered it, and that knowing wasn’t going to be enough to keep it from happening anyway. 

“Hey,” Ben says. “Your hands.”

Stan looks down. They’re shaking. He forces them still.

“Stan.” Ben’s eyes are on him again. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Bill,” Stan says. “He needs help.”

“I meant with you. Not just after what you did to Henry, though that was definitely—a lot. But also what you were saying to Richie earlier. You’re acting like—like you know what’s going to happen.” Ben lowers his voice another notch. “Are you... all right?”

There’s hardly even any point to asking the question. Nothing is all right in Derry; arguably, nothing ever was. Still, he knows what Ben means. What he needs. “I’m fine.”

“Stan, come on. You’re terrified.” Ben huffs a rueful laugh. “Maybe I am, too.”

“It’s nothing new,” Stan points out. “Isn’t that how we lived back then? Every day of our lives?”

“No.” Ben shakes his head. “A lot of the time, sure, even without—” His gaze darts back at the taxi driver, who’s still oblivious. “Without IT. When Bowers and his gang were on the rampage. When nobody had a kind look or word for you, not a single person through all the day. But it wasn’t all just fear and misery and running away from things. Not when I was with you guys. Not when we were together.”

Stan laughs. “Most of it was when we were together, actually.” 

“Those were the best days of my life,” Ben says quietly.

Stan looks at Ben, the dark blur of Derry at night framed through the window behind him. As the shadows of buildings and trees flicker past, flashes of moonlight in between shift Ben’s face through silvered hues: one moment a man, the other a boy, then man again. Either way open-eyed, honest, true. Like he hasn’t changed at all, or more accurately: he hasn’t allowed Derry to change him. Even after everything he’s been through, he hasn’t hardened. Few can say the same, let alone Stan, who feels as though if somebody touches him now, he’ll shatter. 

“They were mine, too,” Stan says, and finds he mostly means it.

Not a moment later, Ben’s face is thrown into abrupt light and colour. Fireworks and sirens. The taxicab’s brakes squeal to a halt. “We’re here,” announces the driver. “Hey, where do you think you’re going? You haven’t paid, asshole!”

Bill stands out in the crowd like a poorly written joke. The only one alone, propelled by purpose through it all, shoving his way past families and giggling teenagers and children at the carnival stands popping bright red balloons with their air rifles. When Stan grabs his arm and wrenches him to a stop he can feel the resistance, the reluctance with which Bill turns away from his singular path and faces him. 

“Stan? What are you d-doing here—”

“What are _you_ doing here?” Standing in the midst of all this seasick circus motion, Stan feels himself losing composure, losing patience. It’s just him; Ben’s lost in the crowd, left behind dealing with the irate taxi driver, fumbling with the cards in his wallet like any of it even still mattered. All the laughter here sounds like screaming, and it makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up on end. “Henry Bowers stabbed Eddie in the face and Mike’s—”

“Mike’s what?” Bill says, face already slackening with whatever horror he’s imagining, and Stan has to take a moment to remember. To tell him:

“Mike’s alive.” He watches Bill release a shaky breath; feels it as though it were his own. He says it again for good measure: “He’s alive. And so is Eddie, and Richie, and so are you. We’ve got to—”

“Stan, it’s the kid,” Bill says.

Stan’s voice trails off. Yellow raincoat and a gap-toothed smile. “What kid, exactly?”

“Th-th-the s-s-skateboard kid,” Bill says, the exasperation obvious in his tone. “I’ve got to get to him, he’s in d-d-danger, I need to—”

“We need to find Ben, and Mike, and the others,” Stan corrects him. “We need to get back together, the seven of us.”

“ _I_ need to—Stan, you d-don’t understand—he w-w-went in there _alone,”_ Bill says, as though it makes all the difference, as though the meaning should be clear: _alone like we weren’t._

Stan does more than understand. He sees the bigger picture, the whole thing, and Bill’s only looking at one piece of the puzzle. “It’s a trap, Bill, can’t you figure that out? And it doesn’t matter, anyway—”

Bill narrows his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

Do it; end it now; end it like how you know it is going to end. Stan bites down on his tongue, long enough to taste blood. He can’t do it, not to Bill. His earnest, steadfast face. “Bill, come back,” he says instead, “you have to come back.”

“Stan, this is the whole puh-puh- _point,”_ Bill says. “We’re here for exactly this—to stop anyone else from getting k-k-killed.”

No, Stan thinks, we’re here to end it. But Bill’s pushing him aside, like he’s nothing more than a stranger in the crowd, an obstacle in his path, and what can Stan do? Where else can he go? He knows how this ends; he has to see it through. He shakes his head and sighs and follows Bill down the rabbit hole, just like he did twenty-seven years ago. 

It’s dark in the funhouse, but at least that’s familiar, to be expected. Just like Bill outpacing him through the tunnels, so that Stan has to keep himself from blinking or else he’ll lose him; he’ll be left behind. But when they turn a fumbling corner and find themselves in a hall of mirrors, Stan stops short without intending to, staring at none other than his own self through the glass. Not even a look of surprise, no shock or sign of startlement. Only a grim recognition, dead behind the eyes.

“There!” Bill shouts, and he’s getting farther away now, chasing after a shadow around the bend. When Stan follows, his reflection keeps perfect pace, matching him step for step. And though his gaze is still firmly fixed on Bill, he can’t help but catch glimpses of his own self out of the corner of his eye: his shirttail coming untucked, flashes of wrist at the bloodied cuffs of his sleeves, the years peeling like skin off a fruit until it’s a boy sprinting by his side. His limbs are skinny and crooked from reading books in lonely corners, his neck craned, his eyes afraid. His mouth is moving in a scream, and though Stan can’t hear him through the glass, can’t hear him anymore, he can remember the words as they fly off his lips: _don’t leave me behind! Don’t leave me here! Don’t leave me—_

Bill smacks face-first into an unforgiving wall of glass, and it’s all Stan can do to keep from colliding into him. When he looks up he catches his reflection’s eye, all put back together again, every inch and every year covering up the cracks, grown and whole and new. He isn’t the boy. He hasn’t been the boy in years. No. The real boy is stuck behind the glass, staring at the grinning face of a clown. 

“NO,” roars Bill, pounding on the glass with his fists—a flicker of a thought: _he thrusts his fists against the posts_ —in the lurching rhythm of a disembodied heartbeat, and Stan can already see what is going to happen next, knows exactly how this is going to end. But it’s Bill; Bill who went back for Georgie, who went back for Bev. Throwing himself down into the dark until it would want him instead. He doesn’t know, Stan thinks, doesn’t know he’s the one IT wants most of all—that’s why IT’s got him here, isn’t it? Keeps luring him back down with his heart on a string. And now there’s another trap, another trick, another boy screaming shrill and scared as Bill heaves himself against the glass. 

It’s too late; it was always too late. Stan can only stand by Bill’s side and watch as beyond their reach, the thin layer of glass breaks through in a burst of shards, each piece sharp and pointed as its own little tooth. Can only grasp Bill’s hand tight in his own—an old memory of pain jolting quick as a current through their palms—and haul him out even as he fights him every step of the way. This shadow, this friend, intent on dragging Stan with him back down into the dark. _Well, I promised you, didn’t I, Big Bill? And you promised me. So now neither of us gets to leave._

Outside, the night air is cool. Stan only lets go of Bill’s hand when they’re back in the crowd, back in the merciless grip of Derry. Bill falls to his knees, fists against the pavement, his shoulders shaking. He’s crying, Stan thinks distantly, and he lifts a hand to his own face, but it comes away dry. He tilts his head up to the blackening sky. Wind and a deep-set chill. A clear night; not even a cloud in the sky. The glow of the moon. Silver.

“Bill,” Stan says. Breath cold in his lungs. “Bill, we’ve got to go.”

Bill looks up at him from the ground. His eyes are sunken, his sweat-matted hair falling over his eyes, a lost, hunted expression on his face. Another puzzle piece sliding into place: the horror he’d seen without them.

“He’s duh-duh-duh-dead,” he rasps. “I cuh-couldn’t save him.”

“You couldn’t,” Stan agrees, not unkindly.

Bill’s face crumples. “I have to end this—Stan, I have to—”

“I know.” Stan holds out his hand. “Come on, Bill. We have to find Ben. It’s time to go.”

Bill stares at his outstretched hand for a very long time. But he takes it eventually. 

The windows of Neibolt House are cracked in. Shards of broken glass litter the front walk, the yard strangled with weeds. The door is open and beckoning.

“It’s my f-f-f-fault,” Bill says. “I can’t ask you to do this.”

“We’re not asking,” Bev says, picking up a wrought-iron spike from the ground.

“Losers stick together,” Ben says.

“Let’s kill this fucking clown,” Richie says, though he doesn’t look particularly happy about it.

Inside, Stan is careful to follow Bill closely, so he’s on the other side of the door when it slams shut. He takes the knife to the curly-haired head that clings to Richie with spindly sharp legs and sends it skittering away, like how Ben had, so that Eddie doesn’t have to say sorry, hunched small and scared against the wall. He gets a better look at the face this time, but he still can’t place the person. “Who was that?” he asks as he picks Richie’s glasses up from the floor. 

Richie flinches away. “What’s it matter to you?”

“What’s it matter?” Stan repeats, grip tightening around the glasses. He doesn’t know. It’s unbearable that he does not know. His internal compass circling haywire between two opposite poles: _It doesn’t matter. It matters most of all._

“Give that here.” Richie snatches the glasses out of Stan’s hand and puts them on, turning away.

Eddie is standing in the corner of the room, eyes wide. He opens his mouth as though to speak, but nothing comes out. 

They make it through the house. They make it down the well. Through the sewers, under the cistern, to the ritual before Eddie finally freezes, his fear catching up to him at last as he stares at the inhaler clutched in his hand, the fire blazing expectant before him. “I can’t,” he says, all rushed out in a single breath like it’s an ugly shame and a relief all in one, the precious, secret thing he brought to burn. “I can’t do it, I can’t.” He squeezes his eyes shut and lifts the inhaler to his mouth, and Richie swats it back down.

“You killed a psychotic clown before you were fourteen,” Richie says, matter-of-fact, like, _did you forget?_

Eddie blinks back at him. “But that’s the point—that was then. This is now.”

“Yeah, that was you, stupid. You’re still the same person, Eds. You’re braver than you think.” 

Stan watches Eddie grapple with this, with the person he used to be, like an old forgotten friend. “Okay,” he says eventually, “okay,” as though it’s not himself he’s remembered but the person standing before him trying to remind him; this person he trusts. 

Eddie reluctantly drops his inhaler into the fire. Richie claps. Eddie whirls around, punching him in the shoulder. 

“Don’t _do_ that—” 

“Ow, what’d you hit me for—”

“Here,” Bev says over them both, handing Eddie the iron spike. “Take it. It kills monsters.”

Eddie eyes it dubiously. “Does it?” 

“Yeah. If you believe it does.”

Stan stays silent. None of it matters. He’s watching their loved things burn. 

When it comes time to chant with the others, he keeps his mouth firmly shut and his eyes open, so that he can see when the lights come dancing down in the dark. So that when the running starts, he’s prepared. He’s the fastest—he’s the first—but when the door slams shut behind him, he’s still alone at the podium, staring out over the audience. 

“Go on, Stanley,” the thing that isn’t his father says. “Go on and speak.”

Stan grips the microphone tighter.

“What’s the matter?” his not-father prompts. “Didn’t you have so much to say? Go on, Stanley—what does it mean to change, to transform? Just what are those pieces of you that it feels the easiest to lose?”

The faces in the audience are melting. There is dust on the podium, in the air; the lights flicker out, cobwebs unravelling from the lofty ceilings. The building has stood hollow for years. None of it is real. 

“Stanley, boy,” his not-father croons, “what’s gotten into you? You always used to be so scared, but now...”

IT pauses. Tilts its head, a distinctly animalistic gesture, and peers at him intently.

“Now... you’re not at all.”

It’s not real. He’s already dead. He tightens his grip on the microphone, and then hurls it out at the audience, the smeared brushstrokes of the pews. Watches it crack into solid glass, spiderwebbing across the smooth flat surface, mirrored shards crumbling to the ground. The synagogue is fracturing all around him. He sees his own face reflected in it, pale and bleak and splintering into pieces before his eyes. 

“You left me,” IT says, voice pitched high and shrill, “you _left_ me, you’re leaving again—”

Stan begins to run, through the pews, through the mirrors, through the years of dust and into the blackness beyond. And all the while, the violent moaning thumps of something chasing him, crashing through glass, screaming after him: “ _They left you!_ They left you, Stanley boy! I’ll never leave you, you know that, don’t you? I’ll never leave you like they did! Stay with me and you’ll float, Stan, you’ll float forever, and you’ll never be alone again!”

It’s that shriek that follows Stan out, cold as breath on the back of his neck. A curtain of glass shards cascades around him, cutting him as he forges his way through the dark, scraping against the skin of his arms, his hands, his wrists. But he only recoils when he collides bodily into something solid—something moving.

“ _Oh shit_ —hey, _hey,_ Stan, is that you? Stan, calm down, it’s me, IT’S ME—”

It’s Richie, and Eddie with him, both heaving for breath like they’ve been running, too. They’re down in the caves under the cistern, under Neibolt, under the synagogue and the Barrens and the rows upon rows of tiny little houses in tiny little streets. Under Derry.

“Hey,” Richie says, pointing his flashlight in Stan’s face and blinding him momentarily. “Are you okay? ’Cause I’m definitely not, but you look like you’ve just seen, I don’t know, a fucking ghost.”

“You’re bleeding,” Eddie says, staring at Stan’s arms.

“I got out,” Stan says, and even as he says it he can barely believe it. He’s out. He’s through. He’s dead and he’s alive, he’s still alive, and if he’s still alive then maybe this could be the last time—maybe this could be—

From elsewhere arises a shout, and the cave rattles around them, raining dust into their hair, and Stan thinks for a moment, wildly, _but I burned the shower cap, it’s gone, it can’t protect us now._ Then Richie shouts “We gotta get the hell outta here, c’mon” and they’re running again, running until they come to a wide cavern with ribs of stone jutting out of the ground as though the heart of some ancient, hollowed creature. Bev and Ben are already there, holding hands and bloodied like they’ve just climbed out of hell. Ahead of them is Bill, drenched wet and crouched at the lip of the cavern, staring in horror at the single source of light: IT, swelled huge and monstrous, and coiled in its winding serpentine grip is the last of their circle, is the seventh, is Mike.

“I know what you are,” IT hisses, and Richie goes stiff beside Stan. IT’s got the point of a claw hooked under Mike’s chin, and as Stan watches, he sees Mike’s throat in a mess of skin and blood, his stare glassy and patient and gone. It’s already happened before, it’s happening again—

Richie scoops a rock off the ground, hurls it with a shocking precision that casts Stan into summer-golden memory, of Bev young and open-faced and laughing as she stands ankle-deep in the river water, and the stone flies from her fist and hits Henry Bowers in the face, at the same time as the stone flies from Richie’s fist and hits IT in the face, and he shouts “HEY, FUCKFACE!”

IT whips its head around, snarling, letting Mike go from its grip.

Richie stands his ground. “Here’s a truth,” he yells, and he doesn’t stop yelling, flinging insults because they’re all he’s got left in his arsenal, his voice clear and shining through the dark, no more sticks and stones; _he burned up his sacrifice,_ Stan keeps thinking, can’t get over that, _why do we have to lose all that we’ve got left, why do we always have to lose?_

So he misses the moment when Richie’s eyes roll back in his head, his limbs suspended in a terrible shaft of light as though caught in flypaper. He’s rising up to meet IT, floating ever closer to the mouth splitting wide, to the yellowed glow pouring out thick as honey. And Stan can only watch him get reeled into that false light, powerless to intervene, because he’s always known how this was going to end, and now he has to watch it happen. They’re out of time; they’ve played it wrong. It was always going to end this way.

Something moves, beside him. 

Eddie is holding the iron spike. His eyes are wide open. His hands are steady.

“If you believe it does,” he says.

“What?” 

“If you believe,” Eddie repeats. 

“Wait,” Stan says slowly. “Eddie, wait—”

Eddie takes a deep breath, like any pitcher winding up for the game-ending throw, and then, too quick for Stan to stop him, he leaves him behind. Steps out into the light and heaves the spike into the mouth gaping wide as an open wound: an impossible target to miss. 

Richie hits the ground like a sack of rocks. Over their heads IT howls in real pain, bursts of light coughing up from its throat, folds and limbs collapsing like a ruptured balloon. Eddie darts forward through the rocks to hover over Richie’s body, shaking him by the shoulders. “I think I killed IT! I did it, Rich, I did it for real!” 

Half-lit in the slant of shadow, Eddie’s face is transformed entirely by his expression, incredulity and pride and revelation all together, as though his daring has given him a truth in return: “You were right, Richie, you were right!” It is a look unlike anything Stan has ever seen from him before. But that isn’t true, is it? Twenty-seven years ago, incandescent with victory, standing in a circle. The red scrawl on his arm, the red blood between their hands: both promises that came with their own pain. _Swear it. Do you swear?_

And Stan had said yes, he had sworn, but now he is only paralyzed still, watching as the claw pierces clean through Eddie’s chest. 

Later, even as Eddie’s face pales ashen grey and blood spurts from his mouth when he tries to speak, it’s that vision that remains in Stan’s mind: Eddie when he thought he had won, the belief seeming too big to be contained in his body, brave. It doesn’t fit with the rest of this picture, with Eddie’s crumpled form against the rocks, with his pained breaths slowing in the dark. With the quiet tremor in Richie’s voice as he says: “We gotta get him out of here.”

Richie. Richie, wrapping his jacket around Eddie’s wound and pressing it down. Richie’s hands staining red. Richie’s face, too, utterly transformed, looking for all the world like he’s lost everything. Everything. 

_Just what are you scared of, Richie,_ they had asked him then—

It’s already happened, Stan tells himself; it’s all going to happen again. It doesn’t matter.

He can feel his heart close in on itself like a fist. But beneath that, hidden within—the crack of a stone. Clenched for so long, so close to the chest.

“I’m sorry,” he says, voice numb. “Eddie, I’m sorry.”

Nobody really hears him, crowded around Eddie, watching the light fade from his face. What had shone there—

“Richie, I didn’t know. I didn’t.”

Richie’s still hunched over Eddie, almost protective. “What?”

“I didn’t know,” Stan repeats. “But it’s okay—this isn’t real. I’ll do it again, and we’ll win like we promised, and you’ll all see each other again, we just have to start over, I just have to do it over—I just have to die.”

That gets him attention. “What?” says Bill. 

“It’s easy,” Stan says, “I just have to die,” and the truth of it sinks into him so deep he shivers, a wash of cold water pulling him down. He sees the paths before him, every single one, and he sees that they’ve really only just been one path all this time, blood branching through the veins of a single body, all cycling to one destination. “I just have to take myself off the board. I have to set you free from me. That’s how I can end this, once and for all.”

“Stan,” Bev says, “hey, Stan, what are you—”

“It’s as simple as that,” Stan says. “It’s okay, I’m already dead, you see? You’ll see each other again, you’ll win this time. I promise. Look, I’ll show you—”

Somebody’s shouting after him, and a hand clutches at his shirt, grabbing his arm, but Stan shakes it off and takes a step, and then another, and then he’s running again, and it isn’t so hard when he’s been doing so much of it, but this time he’s not running away. No. Not like the scared little boy screaming for someone, anyone, down in the deep. This time he’s running straight out of the tunnel and into the cave, towards the light, towards the open mouth waiting for him. Towards his way back to the beginning; to the end.

“STAN,” somebody screams. And Stan would answer, but there’s only the light, the light, the light—

\+ 06

The phone is ringing.

It’s evening. The lamplight is a cocoon of living gold. Outside, through the window, there is something in the shadows, in the dark.

“You made a promise,” Mike says. “We all did. Are you going to keep it?”

There is a jigsaw piece held in Stan’s palm. Thin edge pressing down into the skin. A line of phantom pain. 

“Yes,” Stan says, and slots the final piece into the centre of the puzzle. “I swear.”

There’s a pause over the line.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“I said I will.”

There’s another pause. On the television, a studio audience is laughing. Patty is laughing. 

“Stan,” Mike says. Something very careful to the cadence of his voice. So familiar it aches. How could Stan ever have forgotten what it sounded like? “Is everything all right?” 

“Yes, Mike,” Stan says. “Everything’s fine. It’s right. Everything’s finally right.”

He hangs up the phone. He looks down at his palm where the puzzle piece had been, where he can see the faint trace of a scar beginning to appear. He uses the same hand to cup Patty’s cheek when he gives her a kiss; to write a series of letters, in his study; to lock the bathroom door behind him and run a bath. Water dripping wet down the back of his neck.

He can see Bill’s face before him again. Like the very first time. He’s come full circle. Only this isn’t an illusion spun for him in the dark; it’s a memory, old and worn and well-loved. Bill’s looking at him, and he’s saying something very intently: _Swear it, Stan. Do you swear?_ And Stan says _I swear, Bill,_ says _I hate you, I hate you for making me promise,_ says _I love you, and I told you I’d keep it, I’m keeping it._

Overhead, the bathroom light glows white, bright, complete.

\+ 07

The phone is ringing.

It’s evening. The lamplight unravels gold in the living room. Outside, the rain. The dark.

Stan has his phone pressed against his ear. The skin of his cheek.

“You made a promise,” Mike says. “We all did. Are you going to keep it?”

The skin of Stan’s wrists is clean. Intact. Only a phantom pain aches in his palms. The jigsaw piece held there. 

“Stan? Are you still there, Stan?”

His voice is well-worn over the miles, over the years. To hear it again. Over on the couch, Patty laughs; the sound of it in his ears. Stan tightens his grip around his phone. It rattles, a gesture of such discomposure Patty turns her neck to stare at him from the couch.

“Honey?” Patty asks.

“I’m still here,” Stan says, and he slots the final piece into place in the centre of the puzzle.

“Honey,” Patty says after he hangs up, all attention diverted from the television screen. She’s staring straight at him. “What’s wrong?” 

“It was so easy,” Stan says, as though recounting some old accidental cruelty of childhood, careless and unforgivable as the blurt of a rash word or the crush of an insect under his shoe. The act of misplacing something precious that was entrusted to him. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about?”

It was so easy. It’s this that’s hard: the living, and the living again, and the living with what he’d done. He lowers his head into his hands. Quietly, carefully, he breathes. 

He feels Patty moving toward him, coming to embrace him, and he straightens up, shakes his head to stop her. If she holds him now—he wouldn’t be able to bear it. He couldn’t—

“It’s okay,” he says, and “I’m sorry,” and “I have to go,” and by all three, he means the same thing.

Patty watches him closely, held at arm’s length. She purses her lips. “You’re coming back.” 

It isn’t a question. Stan takes her hand in his. “One way or another,” he promises, and he cups her cheek, kisses her goodbye. 

He lands in Derry, Maine by morning.

“Well, fuck me,” says Richie Tozier with something like reverence in his eyes. “If it isn’t Stan the Man, in the flesh.”

The pleased tilt to his grin. Stan watches it with wonder. “I’m sorry,” he tells him.

Richie blinks at him, confused. “For what?”

“It’s funny,” Ben is saying. “Some of us were never even that far off from each other, but we just didn’t know how close we were, all this time.”

“And then there’s m-me—ended up all the way across the d-damn cuh-cuh-country from all of you.”

“As far away as you can get, really.” 

“Oh, Bill, I missed you too, I dreamed of your tenderly scruffy face every night in my sleep—”

“Beep beep, Richie,” snaps Eddie, and Stan wonders how he could ever have missed it, the slow bloom of stupid delight on Richie’s face.

“Stan, what about you?” Mike asks. His eyes have been on him for a while now. “How have you been?”

Stan looks down at his hands laid in his lap. Palms facing up.

“I remember,” he says, but that’s not quite right. He corrects himself: “I know, now.”

“Know what?” Bev asks. 

At the centre of the table, the fortune cookies are rattling, cracking open on cue. Stan pays them no attention. He looks instead at the others, their faces gathered around his table. His friends. 

“I’m glad to see you again,” he says.

“I’ve seen us die,” Bev says.

“Oh,” says Stan.

“Okay, you know what,” Richie says, throwing up his hands.

There are tears in Bev’s eyes. _The bathtub,_ Stan thinks, and then, _I’m sorry, I’m sorry._

“Wow,” says Eddie, “and you didn’t think to mention this until now? Hey guys, great to see you again, by the way we’re all going to be gruesomely murdered because I saw it happen in my dreams?”

“Look, you were here too—you remember what it was like, back then. How is this any less believable than what happened to us that summer?”

“It’s _entirely_ unbelievable!”

“It is,” Stan agrees, and everyone shuts up long enough to stare at him. “But you already believe it. Of course you do, don’t you? You believe what IT’s capable of. You’re beginning to remember everything.”

“All the better reason to get out of here,” Richie points out.

“And since you remember what IT’s capable of,” Stan continues like he hadn’t spoken, “you can’t possibly think that you’re going to make it out of this town; that IT’s just going to let you go.” He shakes his head. “We’re trapped, and we did it to ourselves, didn’t we? When we made that promise, twenty-seven years ago.”

“So we’re as good as dead,” Eddie says, panic alighting in his eyes. His hands twitch, closing around empty air. 

“No,” Stan says, and though his words are urgent, he feels a deep patience settle over him, pacing his tone slow and certain. “All of you are still alive. Not dead. Not yet. As long as you’re still here, as long as we’re still together, it hasn’t happened yet. Do you understand?”

There’s a silence.

“Wow,” Richie says. “Real uplifting stuff, Stan. Have you considered going into stand-up?”

“No, thanks,” Stan says. “I’ve seen the kind of money they make.”

“ _Okay,_ hotshot accountant, fuck off—I mean, you’re not wrong, but also, fuck you—”

“He’s right,” Bev says. She’s been quiet, preoccupied with her cigarette, but now a clarity returns to her gaze. “We’re here now, and that’s what matters—that we can stop it from happening. That we can save each other.” She smiles at Stan, and oh—there it is. Her aim true.

It takes Stan a moment. But he smiles back at her. 

Afterward, when Mike and Bill come clattering into the hotel lobby, sweeping the rest of them up into their new commotion, he absently lifts his fingers to his lips, touches the shape of it on his mouth. A childlike question: Did anyone else see it? Was it real? 

Bev’s gaze is on him, still. Steady. It doesn’t let him go. 

_Where did you go, that summer,_ Mike asks, and Stan goes where he hadn’t: he follows Richie. 

He’s careful not to get caught, of course. Lags behind and mingles in the festival crowd gathering on the streets. Watches from a safe distance when Richie enters the arcade, and then when he comes back out of it, beelining for the plaza with his shoulders hunched and hands shoved deep into his pockets. He stops before the Paul Bunyan statue, and a figure Stan can’t quite makes out slams into his shoulder before stalking away. Richie jerks back, then stares down at something in his hands. A piece of paper?

A chill spreads slowly over the park, bleeding colour from the trees and grass. A spot of red, vivid against the pale sky overhead: a bouquet of shiny balloons, and clinging to the strings is a clown with a smile full of teeth.

“I missed you, Richie!” IT singsongs as it floats towards him, drifting on the breeze. “I kept your secret all this time, your dirty little secret!”

Richie’s eyes are squeezed shut behind his glasses. He’s muttering something to himself under his breath, and as Stan gets closer within earshot, he can make it out: “—not real it’s not real it’s not—”

Stan picks a stone up off the ground. It’s easier than anything, like it’s been done before: Bev by the river, Richie in the cavern, Eddie with the spike.Stan joins their ranks and flings the rock high into the air, where it bursts a single one of the red balloons swarming the sky, rupturing with a loud _pop._

Richie’s eyes snap open. “The fuck—”

“Come on,” Stan says, grabbing his arm and dragging him away. “We’re getting out of here.”

A chortling laugh rises up behind them, though Stan doesn’t look back. “Stanley, boy!” the voice calls after them. “So good of you to join us! The more, the merrier, isn’t that right? Until you’re left awfully all alone. You remember that, Stan—you remember that!” 

“Holy fuck,” Richie says, stumbling over his own feet as Stan hauls him along, “are you seeing this, too, this is bullshit, we have got to get the fuck out of this town—”

“ _We_ are not going anywhere,” Stan says. “Did you get your arcade token?”

“Did I get my—yeah, I got my fucking token, how’d you know it was—”

“It doesn’t matter. We have to get back to the Townhouse.”

“What? Why?” Richie narrows his eyes at him from behind his glasses. “And what the fuck are you doing here, anyway? Did you—hold on. Are you _following_ me, jackass?”

“I’m here because I should have been,” Stan says. “And because you were there for me. Don’t think I forgot about that.”

“What are you even talking about—”

“Richie, I know, okay? I know.”

“What?”

Stan hesitates. “I know you’re going to run. But you can’t.”

Richie’s face twists up in a snarl. “Oh, fuck you—what, you’re my babysitter now? Newsflash, shithead, we’re grown-ass men and I don’t have to answer to you, or fucking Bill, or anyone—”

He falls abruptly silent, realizing that Stan isn’t paying attention, that Stan’s just caught sight of the pamphlet clenched in his hand, the words written there: _In Loving Memory of Richie Tozier._

“What’s that,” Stan says, and Richie snatches his arm out of his grip and crumples the pamphlet up into a ball in his fist. 

“Nothing. It’s nothing, okay? It’s none of your business.”

Everything else falls away—the bigger picture, the pieces, the way all of this is going to end. Only Richie in front of him, glaring at him, as though daring him to speak. 

“Oh,” Stan says. Can’t he see? “But Richie—you’re alive.”

Richie looks furious, but more with himself than with Stan. “Fuck you—”

“No, Richie, I mean it,” Stan says, and this is _Richie,_ Richie who had stood and clapped for him in a crowd of strangers when he had needed him the most, who’s now about to run as though nobody will notice he’s gone, as though he’ll be able to slip away and they’ll all just let him. He doesn’t even know—

“Richie, listen. I have to tell you something.”

“Jesus, what now? You’re freaking me out here.”

What is there Stan can’t tell him? How had Richie put it again, last time?

_Here’s a truth._

“It’s going to sound unbelievable,” Stan says, keeping his voice steady. “But I’m going to need you to listen, Richie. Okay? Listen to me.”

“That’s not ominous at all.”

Stan takes a deep breath. “I know that your artifact is an arcade token, and I know that you’re planning to run, and I knew to follow you to prevent it, because it’s all already happened before. We’ve been here before. I’ve done this before.”

“What are you talking about—”

“I’ve done this before, over and over, and it always ends the same way: I die. Richie, do you understand? It’s me. _I’m_ dead, and that’s how I know everything.”

Richie is staring at him. “I take it back, you should definitely not go into stand-up, you are deeply unfunny and also there is something wrong with you.” 

Stan can sympathize. If it were him, he wouldn’t believe himself either. But this trying has to be worth something, if only because it feels so awful to do it, to give into weakness, to confess failure. He thinks of Eddie, then— _I can’t go on any further_ —and understands at last the awful shame and relief of saying it out loud. But there’s nothing else to be done. Nowhere else for him to go. 

“Richie, it’s like—links in a chain, and I’ve traced them all back to you. When you run, you break the chain. We lose you. We lose, and we die.”

“You look pretty fucking alive to me,” Richie says.

Stan shakes his head. “Look—don’t tell the others, okay? They won’t understand.”

“ _I_ don’t understand, you asshole—”

“Hey.” They’ve come a ways from the park, and they’re standing on some nowhere street, one they must’ve cycled down countless times in their youth, melted into the everlasting childhood landscape of Derry. Here, where Stan would never have thought they would end up again, he feels a hollow sadness descend upon him, a hopelessness made soft and tangible in the pale light of afternoon. “Richie. I should have told you; I owed it to you to tell you. And I just wanted to say—you could always tell me anything, too. You always could have. You know that, right?”

Whatever Richie sees in Stan’s gaze must give him pause, finally, as he weighs him up, considering. 

“I don’t know what kind of fucked-up game you’re playing at, Stan,” Richie says. “I don’t even _know_ you, not anymore. But I remember you, or I’m remembering more of you, of everything with every minute of the day, and I remember that when I was thirteen years old and dumb as fuck I probably would’ve believed anything that came out of your mouth. But that doesn’t mean I do now.”

“You don’t have to believe me right now,” Stan says. “You’ll see it eventually. I just wanted you to know that I meant what I said.”

“And what was that, exactly?”

“As long as you’re still here, we have a chance. It’s up to you what you choose. But I’m telling you I won’t give up. Not anymore. So don’t worry, Richie—you’re not going to die, because I’m going to get it right, as long as it takes.”

They stare at each other. In the ensuing impasse, the silence between them, another memory flickers into Stan’s mind, fragile as the leap of his pulse in his throat: _do you think we’ll always be friends?_

“If—I said _if—_ you’re telling the truth,” Richie says slowly. “Why the fuck haven’t you told the others? Why me?”

Maybe he really does need Stan to spell it out for him. Stan doesn’t mind, he supposes. He can do that for him. As many times as he needs to believe it.

“It matters that you run,” Stan says, blunt like ripping off a Band-Aid. “It matters that you’re not here. It matters that you _are_ here, Richie.” A pause. “Now can we get back to the Townhouse? We’re out of time, and Henry Bowers is gonna bust into Eddie’s bathroom at any moment.”

“Wait, _what?”_

“We have to go back to the Townhouse to help Eddie. They need you back there—he needs you. We need you.”

Richie looks like Stan’s taken a crowbar and applied it gently to his head.

“We always have,” Stan says, and he turns around, walking briskly away. His chest is thumping a heady siren of adrenaline warning: _Richie’s run, Richie runs, Richie’s gonna run._ But a moment later he hears it, the hurried footsteps on sidewalk pavement following after him. 

“Wait up, asshole,” Richie calls from behind him, and Stan’s hands don’t shake, his chest doesn’t heave, the crashing nausea and relief and misery doesn’t crawl up out of his throat as he walks on.

But it’s a near thing.

Eddie has a knife sticking out of his face and Henry Bowers in his bathroom when Stan and Richie burst in, Bev and Ben hot on their heels. The two of them turn to stare at them with identical expressions of shock frozen on their faces, so it’s remarkably easy, simple even, to reach into his shirt pocket and pull out the straight razor he’d been keeping there—

Richie lets out a screeching cry and crashes into Henry, clattering both of them into the sink. The mirrored cabinet shatters instantly, raining glass into their hair. Stan freezes with his grip tight around the handle of the razor, seized by a disembodied thought, there and gone again— _the shower cap—_

Richie’s got a fistful of Henry’s hair and his fighting strategy seems to be mainly just trying to slam Henry’s head backward into the wall, thump after thump of _“WHY ARE YOU EVEN STILL ALIVE, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE, WHY—WON’T—YOU—JUST—FUCK—OFF—”_

So he doesn’t see Henry’s meaty hands coming up to close in around his neck.

The knife is out of Eddie’s cheek and in his hand. “You heard what he said, fuckface,” he says, and plunges the knife into Henry’s gut with a sickening squelch.

Richie lets out a choked-sounding noise and jerks back from Henry. A mistake, because Henry lifts his gaze from the knife sticking straight out of his chest and starts to laugh, blood gurgling from his mouth. He takes a step forward, towards Richie. 

Bev strides past Stan holding a vase from the hotel room and smashes it clean over Henry’s head.

Richie scrambles out of the way, his eyes bulging. Henry doesn’t even go down. Just turns to face Bev, shards of porcelain in his hair, a snarl on his face. 

Ben starts forward, but Bev doesn’t flinch. “It’s five of us against you,” she says, chin raised high. “You’re outnumbered.” 

Henry pauses. Seems to be actually considering it. 

“See you later, Losers,” he says, hand lifted in a mocking wave—

Stan steps neatly back into the running track of muscle memory. Flicks the blade of the razor outward, lunges forward and drives it into Henry’s throat, choking off his words. Richie jumps backward with a shocked yelp, crashing into the cabinet again. Stan pays him no attention. The line he cuts is neither clean nor straight but deep, and behind the force of his thrust is the will to make the wound last, echoing through all the times he’s been here before; will have to be here again. To leave a scar.

Henry drops bodily to his knees. Stan follows him down, fingers still firmly wrapped around the handle of the razor. He wedges it deeper, so that Henry can’t jerk his limbs, reanimate his grin, rise up from the dead with his bloodied hands closing in to squeeze. So that he can never hurt them, any of them, ever again. Never again.

Henry’s gaze sinks into him, a murky yellowed sort of green, and Stan feels a real chill for the first time: that Henry understands exactly. His mouth opens; nothing comes out but blood. No laughter or parting words. He tilts sideways, and goes still, and only then does Stan let go.

Silence.

“Holy fuck, dude,” Richie says. His mouth is bleeding. He turns around and vomits straight into the sink. 

Eddie makes a muffled sort of noise and collapses. Richie swears and scrambles to catch him, Bev racing forward on his other side. Ben stares down at Henry’s body, or maybe at Stan, his face disbelieving.

“Holy shit, does that, like, hurt—”

“OF COURSE IT DOES, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE—”

“Gauze,” Bev says. “We need gauze.”

“I’ve got supplies,” Eddie says. “In my room. In my luggage. The emergency kit—”

“Of course you brought an emergency kit to a hometown reunion—”

“And it’s a good thing I did, isn’t it—”

“Eddie, maybe you should stop talking,” Ben suggests. “Your face—it’s bleeding really badly.”

“Yeah, Eds, shut up for two seconds in your life, you just stabbed a guy with a knife you pulled out of your own face, are you crazy—” But Richie’s grinning like he can’t believe his eyes. 

“Are you really saying this to me right now, me, the guy who just saved your ass back there—”

“Sorry, who was saving whose ass?”

“I’ll get the emergency kit,” Bev says, “just—shut up, both of you,” and she hurries out of the bathroom, and without thinking about it, really, Stan follows. 

Outside of the cramped, bloodied bathroom, the stillness of the hotel bedroom feels almost surreal, the bed neatly made and the dressers and desk and chairs still standing, untouched from the storm of violence like none of it even happened. Bev rifles through Eddie’s luggage, throwing clothes out onto the floor left and right, and as she does, the sleeve of her jacket slips down, revealing the tip of a blackened bruise on the skin of her wrist.

Stan should leave. He should get to Bill. He should pick the fallen clothes up from the floor and fold them, put them back where they belong; Eddie’d probably appreciate it. But he finds himself reaching out as though through water, the air yielding around him as he cuts through it to place a hand over Bev’s wrist, lightly against the bruise there. She falls so still that Stan feels the need to hold his breath. 

“Does it hurt?” he asks. 

She blinks at him. Like she’d forgotten it was there, or that he was there. She doesn’t react how he would expect—wrench her arm away, brush him off. Instead she keeps eerily calm, betrayed only by the flicker in her eyes: the tail of an animal retreating into the cover of the woods, slipping out of reach. How many times has that expression been pulled out before? How many times has it worked?

“It’s fine. I must have knocked into something—”

“Bev.” The sharpness of his tone is worn thin by his exhaustion. _I can see it. It’s real._

“It’s not like that,” Bev begins, but stops. She looks at him; really seems to see him. The clarity returning to her gaze. 

“Okay,” she says at length. “It was like that. But it’s over now.”

“What’s over now, exactly?”

“I’m leaving him.” A pause, to let that sink in; that and all its implications. “Oh, I know what you’re going to say—I shouldn’t have let it happen or I shouldn’t have let it happen for so _long_ or I should have left the first time, the second time, any of the other times. But I just—Stan. We’re beyond that, aren’t we?”

Stan raises an eyebrow. “Beyond what?”

Bev makes a vague gesture with her hand, reminiscent of if she were holding a cigarette. “I mean, look at us. We’re back _here,_ for God’s sake. In Derry. This is what it was all _for,_ wasn’t it?”

“What do you mean, _it?”_

“What else could I possibly mean?” Bev says. She sounds incredulous. “Stan, don’t you remember what it was like? After we left this place? The years passing like fog? And none of it felt real, none of it felt like it meant anything at all. I couldn’t hold onto anything, I was losing myself completely, and it was so terrifying, except—except in the moments when it felt like…” She closes her eyes. “Like how it felt before.”

“You mean when you were in pain,” Stan says flatly.

Bev opens her eyes. “When I felt alive.” It isn’t a correction. “When I felt real. Like I existed, and it mattered. Like how it was years ago, though I’d forgotten. And all I could do was chase that feeling, pull it over myself and hide in it forever, try to convince myself that that was the whole thing. What it meant to live. You know? But then I got the call, Stan, I got Mike’s call and I remembered all of it, I remembered where I came from. It was like the fog had lifted and I could see everything clearly, and now that I can see myself again I’ll never let go. I don’t need you to tell me—I _know._ I know who I am, but I needed to come back, I think—” And for the first time she falters. “I needed you. I needed all of you, to remember who I was. Who I am. Don’t you understand?”

A silence lapses after her burst of words. She looks out of breath, chest heaving, but her gaze is firm in its conviction. 

Stan understands exactly what she means, because it’s true, it’s been proven again and again: they are only themselves again now that they are together. But for him, perhaps only for him out of all of them, the fog was a blessing when it came. In that fog he became a shadow, and what a relief it was to let all the rough edges and inconsistencies that didn’t fit its mold fall away. To leave behind the boy. And the world that was invented for him was the same one that had been promised to him as a child, where the monsters were only human and the most common cause of death was carelessness and the vast garden that called itself life was mostly tameable. Here was the soil, here were the roots, here was the shovel: everything else faded to a distant dreamlike murmur in the back of his mind. So he devoted himself to his labour and tended that garden for over twenty years and it return it spat him back out into the cruel clarity of childhood, where he was no longer simply the shadow to his former self but made complete, made powerful once again, and he would do anything to be able to give up that power and return to his ordinary patch of earth. What he had grown there. 

“Stan,” Bev says; she must be able to sense him travelling further and further away from her. He shakes his head. 

“You are real, Bev,” Stan tells her, taking care to make sure his voice does not shake, to match her resolve with his. 

“I know that.”

“You’re as real as I am.” Irony in the ghost of a smile that flicks over his face, there and gone again. 

“I know that, now,” Bev says, “I remember.”

“Do you?”

With her other hand, she takes Stan’s hand off her wrist, turns it palm-up and places her own beside it. The scar that runs unbroken through them both. 

“I promise,” she says. 

There’s a cough from behind them.

“Just came to check,” Ben says, looking at them oddly. “It’s been a while and those two are, uh, freaking out.” He jabs a thumb back at the bathroom, from where Richie and Eddie’s voices can be distinctly heard:

“At least you’re gonna have a total badass scar now.” 

“Oh, thanks, that’s definitely my greatest priority right now, that makes me feel so much better.” 

“Well, Eds, that’s what I’m here for.”

“We’re all good here,” Bev rushes to say. “I got it.” She grabs the emergency kit, smiles at Ben, and heads back into the bathroom. 

Stan looks down at his hand, palm still upturned. When he looks back up, Ben is watching him. 

“Stan,” he says. “Are you all right?”

What Stan had thought he needed from him, last time: _I’m fine._ But he can’t say it without hearing it in echo of Bev’s voice, so frighteningly detached, just a minute ago, and he knows that to parrot it now would be to wrong her, somehow. He says nothing instead.

“What you did just now, back there—” Ben begins to say.

“I’d do it again.” 

“That wasn’t what I asked. Hey, you’ve got blood all over you. You look—”

“Ben. Do you trust me?” The answer suddenly matters to Stan very much.

Ben stares at him like it’s a trick question. “Yes,” he says, sounding confused, but he says it without hesitation. “Of course I do.”

“Why?” Stan asks. His voice is hoarse. “You don’t know me. None of us know each other. It’s been almost thirty years.”

“Stan—come on.” Ben looks skeptical now, like Stan really is trying to pull one over him. “Of course we know each other.”

“Right,” Stan says faintly. No wonder Richie had been able to run. Still, there’s something to Ben’s good faith that makes it feel immense, something you can’t turn your face away from. “Thanks, Ben.”

“What makes you ask?”

“I need to go find Bill. Meet us at Neibolt with the others, okay? With everyone.”

“Bill?” Ben looks surprised. “I’ll come with you—”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Stan says, and before Ben’s voice can brook no argument, he adds: “I think you should talk to Bev.”

“What? Bev?” Ben blinks. Stan thinks the magnitude of his surprise is rather unwarranted. “Why—”

“You said you trusted me. So trust me. I’ll get Bill. I’ll get us together. All of us.”

Stan’s left no space for a response, but Ben responds anyway. Giving him a long look. 

“Okay, Stan,” Ben says, and there it is—a sincerity that drags you onto its level, that you just can’t let down. “We’ll be waiting for you.”

Bill stands out in the crowd like a poorly written joke. When Stan grabs his arm and wrenches him to a stop he can feel the resistance, the reluctance with which Bill turns to face him.

“Stan? What are you d-doing here—”

“Henry Bowers stabbed Eddie in the face,” Stan tells him. 

Bill’s face blanches white with shock. “ _What?_ Henry—he’s s-s-still here?”

“No,” Stan says. Blood drying on his hands, flecked onto his sleeves. “I killed him.”

He watches Bill’s jaw go slack with some strange measure of vindication. _I swore, Bill._ “Stan, is Eddie all right? Is everyone safe?”

“Everyone’s fine, Bill, everyone except for you.” Bill blinks at him, uncomprehending. “We have to go. We have to end this.”

“Stan, it’s the kid.”

Stan stares at him, his beseeching face. _It’s a trap,_ he could say, _it doesn’t make a difference, anyway,_ but looking at him now, firm in his faith that he has found something to save, who is Stan to tell him it doesn’t matter? Helpless as he was when he was just a child listening to his best friend tell him that monsters were real. Unable to deny what he had already known, deep down inside. 

And in a way—isn’t Stan in his own little trap, his running reel, trying to do the exact same thing as Bill? 

The understanding when they’d locked eyes in a grassy field, far away and long ago: a shard of glass between them.

“Stan, this is the whole puh-puh- _point,”_ Bill says. “We’re here for exactly this—to stop anyone else from getting k-k-killed.”

Bill’s pushing him aside, like he’s nothing more than a stranger in the crowd, an obstacle in his path. What _are_ they here for? To end this, was what Stan thought; to keep them from losing, always losing, in the end. Put another way, then, isn’t it exactly this? Standing by his friends and following them into the dark. Just like he did twenty-seven years ago, and just like he does now.

“There!” Bill shouts, and he chases after a shadow around the bend, smacks face-first into an unforgiving wall of glass. 

Stan looks up. Catches his reflection’s eye. His reflection watches him back, unwavering.

“NO,” shouts Bill, pounding on the glass with his fists. A heartbeat flicker of a thought: _and still insists he sees the ghosts._ And Stan’s gaze focuses, past his reflection, onto the boy behind the glass screaming shrill and scared. For somebody to help him, to not leave him, to not leave him behind. 

In the glass Stan’s reflection stands tall. He isn’t the boy. He hasn’t been the boy in years. He’s grown, and whole, and new, and he can help somebody else screaming alone in the dark. 

He raises his fists and brings them down into the glass aside Bill; feels it shiver under his weight.

The clown’s laughter stutters.

Stan’s pulse roars in his ears. He slams into the glass, pounding on it with the same feverish urgency as Bill. Beneath their combined weight, he can see the crack spiderwebbing out from under his smarting fists, the give in the glass. And behind it is a boy, is every child with a missing poster left to rot on a telephone pole in the merciless heat of summer, is the seven of them standing in a circle in a field, holding hands and swearing to never let it happen again.

The glass shudders. Breaks through in a burst of shards. Suddenly Stan’s falling, a cacophony of splintering glass in his ears, raining down all around him. _The shower cap,_ he has time to think, wildly and for no reason at all, and then he hits the ground. Lands badly, shattered glass cutting into the skin of his arms. Beside him, Bill careens forward through the windfall of glass, lunging for the boy.

“WE HAVE TO GO,” Bill shouts, and in the near distance a frenzied blur is screaming in shrill rage, teeth pressed up against the glass. Stan blinks owlishly. The glass is digging into his palms, ground into sharp grit, a thousand tiny pinpricks. “GO, STAN, WE HAVE TO GO—” A hand closes around his wrist, hauling him up by the sleeve, nearly wrenching his arm out of his socket. Stan’s feet find purchase on the ground; he grips hold of Bill’s arm and follows blindly this shadow, this friend intent on dragging him back up out of the dark.

Outside, the night air is cool. The crowd is alive with laughter, motion, the spinning lights and colour. Only then does Stan let go of Bill’s hand, lets himself fall to his knees against the pavement. His shoulders shake. 

“That—that was,” the boy says, his voice pitching high, face white and wet with tears. “That was real, that really happened—”

“You’re alive,” Stan says, and he doesn’t know who he’s saying it to, but the amazement is a thick ache in his throat, the wonder.

The boy lapses into hiccuping gulps of breath. He’s so young, Stan thinks; were we ever that young? Was that us?

“Listen to me,” Bill says, placing his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Go find your friends. Your fuh-family. Stay with them. D-don’t go off by y-y-yourself alone. You have to s-st-stay together. And I swear...” He swallows; his jaw sets. “It’ll be over. We’re gonna end this. You won’t have to be scared, ever again.”

The boy stares at them. Without another word, he backs away, until he’s running, disappearing into the crowd. And as he goes, Bill seems to sag beside Stan, slumping forward, his fists slowly unclenching at his side.

“You saved him,” Stan says. Breath cold in his lungs.

Bill looks at him. His eyes are sunken, his sweat-matted hair falling over his eyes. “We did,” he says, like there was never any doubt.

_Well, I promised you, didn’t I? And you promised me._

“Stan, you’re crying.”

Stan lifts a hand to his own face. It comes away wet. He tilts his head up to the blackening sky.

Maybe there really is a way to save everybody. But he can’t see it alone.

“Stan,” Bill says. “Are you all right? Your hands are bleeding.”

“We’ve got to go,” Stan rasps. “It’s time to go—they’re waiting for us—I promised Ben.”

Bill watches him closely. “Okay,” he says. “Come on, I’ll take us back.”

Stan stares at him. “You’ll—what?”

Bill nods his head in a pointed direction. “Come on,” he says again. “I’ll take us.”

Wind and a deep-set chill. A clear night; the glow of the moon. Silver.

Bill holds out his hand, and Stan takes it.

On the back of the bike Stan clings to Bill’s shoulders and remembers how he never used to accept rides on Silver, not like Eddie or Richie or Mike who probably each enjoyed some different part of the same secret thrill, risk or recklessness or joy. Stan always stuck to his own bicycle, his grip tight around the handlebars, and was content to watch from a distance as his friends sped out of control down grassy hills and pothole-ridden roads, then circled back around again for more. All while hollering into the wind: _hi-yo Silver, AWAY!_

Now they ride in silence, or something close to it—Silver rattles beneath them, metallic in the night; her wheels whistle. Flashes of Derry pass by too quickly to see, shapes and shadows in the dark, so he lets them go. They’re going fast, turning sharp corners, but Stan doesn’t tell Bill to slow down, to be careful. He can’t help but feel as though care seems to be something beyond them now. Instead he hangs on, wind in his hair, and lets Bill guide them to where they need to be. 

Up ahead, the windows of Neibolt House are cracked in. The door is open, creaking on its hinges. At its mouth are the others, all five of them, ready and waiting. 

“Well, isn’t this a sight for sore eyes,” Richie says as they pull up alongside.

“You’re all right!” Mike’s relief is clear on his face. “Thank god you’re all right.”

“The boy,” Stan says, as Bill brakes Silver; he lets go of his grip, touches back on solid ground. “He didn’t die—we saved him.”

“What boy?” Eddie asks.

“The skateboard kid,” Bill says. “He’s fine—it’s fine, now.” He casts his gaze over the others, and Stan feels a headache coming on. But to his astonishment, all Bill says is, “Are you guys sure about this?”

“We’re here, aren’t we?” says Bev, holding a wrought-iron spike in her hands.

“Losers stick together,” says Ben.

Stan can’t believe his ears. “What, you’re not going to try and talk us out of this?”

Bill turns to look at him, surprisingly level. “Back there—we couldn’t have saved that kid if it was just one of us. I couldn’t have done it by myself. And I don’t think I’ll be able to do this alone, either.” A rueful sort of smile on his face. “And besides. It was to each other that we made that promise, wasn’t it? ”

“All right, then, let’s kill this fucking clown,” says Richie, and for the first time since he’s said it, Stan has to laugh, hollow and helpless.

Mike turns to Stan, then, with a strange expression on his face. This has never happened before. Stan starts to get a very bad feeling.

“Stan,” Mike says. “Why do you think that you’re dead?”

Stan’s blood goes cold.

“Oh, yeah,” Richie says, dragging out the syllables like he’s only just remembered. “I told them.” He shrugs. “Oops?”

“What are you talking about?” Bill’s brow is furrowed as he looks between them. “What do you mean, Stan’s dead?”

“Why don’t you ask him? He’s the one who said it.” Richie jerks a thumb at him. “But also—” and he starts counting on his fingers because he’s an asshole “—he knew about Bowers before he even showed up, he knew where to find Bill, he knew where to find _me,_ he knew about...” His mouth flattens. “My token. So what’s going on here, Stan, exactly? Care to explain to the rest of the class?”

They’re all staring at him now. Beyond them, the door beckons. 

_It was to each other that we made that promise, wasn’t it?_

Stan tries to think of the best way to break this to them.

“It’s like I told you, Richie. I know things that are going to happen, because they’ve already happened.” Stan keeps his face neutral. “I’ve been through all of this before. It keeps repeating for me, over and over and over.”

Dead silence.

Eddie laughs, a harsh, nervous sound. “Is this a joke?”

“Stan, that doesn’t make any s-s-sense.” Bill has a look of well-meaning concern on his face, like Stan genuinely hasn’t noticed and needs someone to point this out to him.

“It _doesn’t_ make sense,” Stan agrees. “Of course I know it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I never said anything. But it happened. And it happened again, and again, and again. If you can think of it like Bev’s dreams—it’s similar to that, except I actually experienced them for real.”

Bev stiffens. “So you’ve seen them, too?”

“Wait, the ones about our deaths?” Ben says. 

“And you didn’t say anything until now?” Eddie demands. 

“It’s not like that—” It’s a little like that, Stan concedes. “You wouldn’t have believed me. You don’t believe me now. I told you, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“And you acting like a fucking maniac does?” Eddie’s hysterical. “We’re literally about to go kill a clown monster that we already fought twenty-seven years ago and then _completely forgot._ Is any of this shit making sense to you?”

“Stan,” Mike says slowly. “You’re saying you’ve been through all of this before?”

Stan nods. 

“Okay,” Mike says. He wets his lips. “How _many_ times have you been through this before?”

Their eyes on him, expectant. 

“This is the seventh time,” Stan admits.

Ben gasps; Eddie fumbles for something in his pocket. Bev stares at him with her hand over her mouth. 

“And it never works?” Mike asks. “We never win?”

“Every time, we lose, and I die, and it brings me back to the beginning. So that’s it, all right?” Stan shrugs. “That’s your answer—what am I supposed to believe other than that I’m dead?”

“Dude, you’re literally breathing and moving and talking to us right now,” says Richie, “how can you be dead—”

Stan shakes his head. “I felt it.” Again: “I _felt_ it.”

Another silence creeps over them, an uneasy one. Ben looks shell-shocked; Eddie like he’s going to throw up. Bev with tears in her eyes.

“But I keep coming _back,”_ Stan says in the resounding silence, the exhaustion bleeding through in his voice, “and this must be why. Do you get it? I’m supposed to fix it. I’m supposed to fix everything. I’m the only one who can, because I’m the one who keeps coming back, and I’m already dead, and I don’t have anything else to lose.” 

“Wow,” Richie says with feeling. “What a crock of bullshit.” 

“Richie,” Bill says warningly, which obviously only sets Richie off further.

“We’re not chess pieces on a board for you to move around, and if you’ve got helpful visions of the future why the hell wouldn’t you _tell_ us—”

“Look, if you know what’s going to happen, then what _is_ it?” Eddie cuts in. “What happens next?”

“Stan,” Mike says. He looks—sorry, maybe. Stan can’t stand to think why. “Just what is it that you remember?”

Stan takes a breath. Releases it.

“Inside the house, we’re going to get separated. Richie’s going to be attacked by the head of somebody he knows. Ben, by the mirror. We have to break it.”

“Did you say a _head—”_

“The mirror?” Ben says at the same time, perplexed.

“We’re going to go down into the sewers, under the cistern. The ritual isn’t going to work—was never going to work.” Mike sucks in a loud breath; Stan plunges on. “IT’s going to chase us, split us up and show us things that we’re scared of. But we have to stick together, or else...”

He scans their expectant faces and tries to think of what to say. Eddie, with your fist closed around the inhaler in your pocket—don’t step out into the light, don’t leave us behind. Richie, don’t pick up the stone, don’t throw it, don’t look into the lights. Bev, don’t press the iron spike into Eddie’s hands and tell him it kills monsters, if only he believes. Don’t do it; don’t save each other.

How can he say it?

“...or else we lose,” Stan says. “Every time, we’ll always lose.”

“So that’s it, then,” Eddie says, breathing hard and fast, eyes wide. “We’re gonna die. IT kills us.” 

“No,” Stan says, running out of patience. Haven’t they been listening? “IT kills _me.”_

“Stan, is it...” Bill swallows. “Is I-I-I- _IT_ doing this to you?”

Stan shakes his head. “No. IT doesn’t—IT never seems to know. IT doesn’t ever change, either; it’s another fixed point. Whatever this is... it’s something bigger.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Ben says hopefully. “Something’s on our side.”

“Except we don’t know the catch,” Eddie says. “There’s gotta be a catch, right?”

“Stan, if you’re getting second chances,” Bev says, her face grim. “And third chances, and fourths. What if they run out?”

Stan doesn’t trust himself to speak, so he says nothing.

“Well, it’s not going to ever hap-p-pen again,” Bill says firmly. “No one’s dying—not S-St-Stan, not anyone. Now that we know what’s coming, we’ll be p-p-prepared. Right?”

They all look back up at the door, swinging open in the breeze. Stan is silent. He thinks of a length of rope. He thinks of himself nearing the end of it, and tries to discern if what he feels is terror, or relief. The absolute darkness beyond, complete.

Inside the house, Stan hisses “Don’t get separated” when Bill makes to move ahead through a door, so all seven of them are there to watch as letters carve themselves into the skin of Ben’s stomach. It only gets up to the three jagged lines of an Hbefore Bev swings the spike into the reflection’s grinning face and shatters it into pieces. 

“Okay, obviously not the ideal circumstances to see you with your shirt off, but _damn,_ dude,” Richie says with a whistle.

 _“Beep beep, Richie,”_ Eddie all but barks.

In the next room they surround the fridge in a half-circle, makeshift weapons at the ready. 

“Who did you say it was, again?” Richie asks Stan.

“I didn’t.” 

The door bangs open. 

“Richie,” the boy cooes from inside the knot of its crooked limbs, “you wanna go again, Richie? Wanna go again?”

All the colour drains out of Richie’s face.

“You’re just so fun to play with, Richie,” the boy says, and its head rolls out of the fridge. Everyone scrambles backward, all shouting at once; Eddie slams himself into the wall with a thud. The head sneers at them from the ground as thin and spindly legs begin to punch out from under its skin, and it launches straight at Richie’s face.

Stan steps forward, stabs it straight through with the knife, picks it up by the curls of its hair and flings it out of the room.

“Who was that?” Bill asks, in the pause that follows.

Richie’s on the floor. Stan bends down to pick up his glasses, fallen and cracked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stan says.

Richie’s eyes snap to him. He’s breathing hard, staring at Stan, at the glasses offered in his outstretched hand. Residual panic crystallizing into a more immediate horror as he meets Stan’s gaze, as he must realize exactly the extent of what Stan understands.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stan says again, and he means it. 

Richie’s face is peculiarly bared without his glasses. Every emotion visible as it flicks rapidly through him, channels on a television screen: shock, panic, self-loathing, despair, fear. All Stan can do is press his glasses, neatly folded-up, into his hands.

After a moment’s pause, Richie puts them back on with trembling fingers. 

“Let’s get going,” Stan says, straightening up, turning around, and from behind him, Richie says: “It does matter.”

Stan stills. He’s turned away, so he can’t see Richie’s expression; can only see the others, Bev and Bill, Mike and Ben, Eddie in the corner of the room, plastered against the wall, eyes wide. 

“It does matter,” Richie says again. His voice without inflection. It sounds like him, Stan thinks. It sounds honest. “Shit, we’re at the end of all things, we’re gonna die, even _time_ is fucking itself up for us and I still can’t say it?” He shakes his head and laughs. “I still can’t—”

“Rich,” Bev says, “hey, it’s okay.”

“No, I gotta—I gotta tell you guys. Okay? I gotta tell you on my own terms. I can’t have this hanging over my head all the time, can’t have fucking Pennywise holding it over me. It is what it is.”

“It’s _what?”_ Bill says, looking bemused.

“It was Bowers’ cousin.” Richie pauses. “You remember him? He was here visiting Derry that summer. He wasn’t that bad, you know—he didn’t know anybody in town, didn’t know who to hang out with, who to steer clear of, and _I_ sure didn’t know who he was, who his fucking cousin was. I met him at the arcade. We played a few rounds of Street Fighter. It was—” Richie swallows. “It was nothing. Fuck, it was nothing. So stupid. But I was thirteen and I thought he was cool and I didn’t want to think about killer clowns and missing kids, I wanted to be _normal,_ I wanted to...”

Stan turns back around. Richie’s still on the floor, sitting up. The look on his face is resigned: _I may as well lose everything._

“I wanted to kiss him,” Richie says; his voice delivers it flat. “Obviously it didn’t end well. But that’s not the point. Or maybe it is. Nothing ends well with me, and if we’re gonna die anyway, if I’m gonna die, I just—” He grits his teeth. “Whatever. Now you know, okay? Now you all know.” He holds out his hands, wiggles his fingers: ta-da. “There you have it, all right? That’s my shitty secret. That’s me.”

Nobody says anything.

Bev steps forward and takes his hand into her own. He flinches away. She holds on; doesn’t let go. Threads her fingers through his.

“Oh, Rich,” she says quietly. 

Bill steps up to Richie’s other side, across from Bev. He holds out his hand. Richie stares at it.

“C’mon, Richie,” Bill says.

Richie grips Bill’s hand, and Bill pulls him up to his feet, and then keeps pulling. Richie smacks into him with a grunt, looking gobsmacked as Bill drags him into a clumsy one-armed hug. 

“Bill—man, I appreciate this, truly, but—uh—”

“I’m sorry,” Bill says. He looks miserable. “For that summer.” 

“Bill, what are you talking about? Are you serious? We were thirteen—”

“You shouldn’t have been alone. None of us should have been.” Bill shakes his head. “It was my f-f-fault.”

“Bill,” Richie says, still awkwardly sort of clutching Bill, or being clutched by him, or both. He makes eye contact with Stan behind Bill’s back and makes a face at him, a dumbfounded sort of grin, like, _can you fucking believe this guy?_ “I’m amazed. Truly. Are you really managing to make my coming out about you?”

“If we’d been together—”

“Well, I’d still be gay, so—”

“I just mean—you wouldn’t have been alone.” Bill lets him go, gives him a look. “It’s a long time to have been alone.”

“It’s fine,” Richie says after a beat, but his face is contorted like he’s been socked in the gut and is now furiously trying to wipe it blank of all emotion. “I’m fine. I’m here, aren’t I?” 

“You’re right, though, Richie,” Mike says. “It does matter.” 

Richie exhales loudly. “Okay, jeez. I got it. Can we go kill this clown now?” 

As they’re gearing up to move on, Ben says, straight-faced and serious, “Bowers’ cousin doesn’t know what he’s missing out on.”

“Oh, FUCK you,” Richie says immediately, “I fucking never should’ve told any of you anything,” but there’s an awful sort of relief breaking over his face, the weight of years and years.

Eddie is still standing in the corner of the room. He is staring at Richie with the strangest expression, one that entirely transforms his face. He opens his mouth as though to speak, but nothing comes out. 

Down the well, through the sewers, under the cistern, and deep in the cavern, Eddie finally freezes. “I can’t,” he says, and it comes out a half-sob; he’s taken out his inhaler just to stare at it, clenched in his fist like he wants it to break. “Fuck, it’s so stupid—Stan, you’ve done all of this so many times already, and I still can’t even—I can’t go any further—” 

“You stabbed Henry Bowers with a knife you pulled out of your own face,” Richie says, so earnest Stan almost wants to look away.

“It’s different—” 

“You killed a psychotic clown before you were fourteen.” 

“But that was—” 

“You’re braver than you think,” Richie says, and Eddie just—shakes his head.

“No, you're all wrong—that’s you. It’s all of you that are brave, and I’m...” His voice trails off. 

“Here, take—” Bev starts.

“Eddie, you can do it,” Stan says over her; she shoots him a startled look. “You can do it, if you believe it. Do you know how I know? Because you always do.” 

Eddie’s mouth is half-open. “I do?” 

“Every time. How can you think you aren’t as brave as me—it’s the opposite. You don’t even know what’s going to happen, and you’re still going to go on anyway.” Stan’s throat clenches. “Because you believe.” 

“Believe what?” 

Stan’s gaze slides over to the iron spike still held firmly in Bev’s hands. 

“What else?” Richie says in his stead. He looks amazed that Eddie can’t piece this together himself; that he entrusts Richie to give it to him. “In yourself, Eds. You believe in yourself.”

Eddie stares down at the useless inhaler in his hand.

“It sure doesn’t feel like it,” he says. 

“I believe in you, Eds,” Richie says calmly. 

“So do I,” says Stan.

“Me too,” says Bill.

“And me,” says Bev. 

“Of course,” says Ben.

“Always,” says Mike, his voice low. 

Eddie stares like he is seeing all of them for the very first time, or more accurately, perhaps: he is seeing what they see for the first time. 

“Okay,” he says, his voice sounding very small. “Okay.”

A pause.

“Okay,” Bill says. “What now?”

“The ritual—” Mike begins. 

“It doesn’t work.” Stan doesn’t even let him finish. “It was never going to work.”

“Hold on,” Richie says. “You let us fuck off around town all day finding those artifacts for no reason? Doesn’t seem real efficient of you.”

Eddie’s gaze snaps back to Stan. “Wait. I went back to the pharmacy for nothing? That shit shaved ten years off my life!”

“I’m glad I found mine again anyway,” Bev admits. “My artifact—it was something important to me.”

The side of Ben’s mouth is crooked up in a rueful smile. “Mine, too. So important that I’ve kept it with me for the past twenty-seven years.”

“Well, that’s great for you,” Eddie says, incensed. “I had to go down to the pharmacist’s freaky murder basement and get projectile vomited on, and that’s barely even scraping the surface of all the disgusting shit I saw—”

“Look, I don’t know the unknown variables when I change something,” Stan says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen except for what’s already happened. So it’s safer to stick closer to exactly what I know.”

“So what happens next, then?” Mike asks. Stan expected irritation from him at having his painstakingly researched plan come to nothing, but he’s taking it in stride. He looks maybe even a little relieved, to discover that he’s off the hook; that the burden of knowing is no longer his to bear. 

“Whenever we did the ritual, IT would just come out and attack us, and we’d get scared, get separated. I don’t know what happens to everyone else—I just know what I saw.”

“And what, exactly, d-d-did you see?” Bill says.

Stan forces himself to say it. The truth, that’s all, as childish as it sounds. “I was in the synagogue for my bar mitzvah.”

“For real?” A slow grin dawns over Richie’s face. “I remember that, holy shit—that was, like, the highlight of the entire summer from hell. You said _fuck!_ In front of everybody! The look on your dad’s face, man. How’d that get twisted into nightmare fuel?”

Stan flattens his mouth into a thin line. “It wasn’t real,” he says, and then, “just remember that, all right? No matter what you see. What any of you see. It isn’t real. We make it out. We find our way back to each other. Okay? We just have to remember—”

“What the fuck is that,” Eddie says very quietly.

From inside the jar on the ground, the stretched rubber skin of a red balloon puffs up and begins to swell.

Despite all warning, there is still running. Shouting, disorganized stumbling from the crown of jagged rock, from the laughter filling up the cave. Stan’s prepared; he tries to stay with the others. Runs with them down the tunnels, keeping perfect pace, and hears the door slam shut behind him.

“No,” Stan says. “No, no, _no.”_

The synagogue pews are empty. He’s alone.

It’s not real, he reminds himself, and he raises his microphone to throw it at the glass—

He’s not holding a microphone. He’s still holding the knife from the house. 

“...the word _leshanot_ come up a lot, which means to change, to transform.” 

Stan’s mouth goes dry. 

“Which makes sense, I guess.”

He turns his head. Next to him at the podium, his thirteen-year-old self addresses an empty audience. 

“Because today I’m supposed to become a man...”

He watches himself as though in a trance, mesmerized. The nervous fidget of his fingers around the microphone. 

“...It’s funny, though.” The boy giggles; the tight line of his mouth comes undone. “Everyone has some memories they’re prouder of than others, right?”

This wasn’t supposed to change. It wasn’t supposed to—

“And maybe that’s why change is so scary, ’cause the things we wish we could leave behind...” Boy Stan lowers his voice into a hushed whisper, almost conspiratorial, as though sharing a secret. His tone harshens, curved and mocking. “The whispers we wish we could silence, the nightmares we most wanna wake up from, the memories we wish we could change, the secrets we feel like we have to keep...” He breaks off into a giggle again. “They’re the hardest to walk away from! Isn’t that right? And the good stuff—the pictures in our mind that fade away the fastest—those pieces of you it feels the easiest to lose...”

His head rolls around on its shoulders, then, an awful unnatural motion, to look straight at Stan, face leering. Stan recoils backward. “Maybe I don’t wanna forget! ’Cause today I’m supposed to become a man, but I don’t feel any different. I know I’m a Loser— _loser loser loser!”_ he singsongs. “And no matter what, I always fucking will be! I’ll always fucking lose!”

As Stan watches, unable to tear his eyes away, the face of his former self begins to blur, as though a long muddied brushstroke. Still, he continues to speak through the spreading stain of his mouth. “You’re spoiling all the fun for everyone, with your hidden secrets up your sleeve, your little tricks. You were always no fun, weren’t you?” He takes a step towards him; Stan stumbles back. “Stick-in-the-mud Stan. Scared little boy Stan. Dead little boy Stan, all alone, floating in the water. What’s your secret, Stan? What do you know that I don’t?”

Stan opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He can’t speak. Silenced before the wrathful face of his thirteen-year-old self, rotting as it is—rotting because Stan left him behind. Left him here. 

“Why are you even here?” The boy advances. Bits of skin begin to flake away from his skin like wet paper. “Why are you still here, when I’m dead?”

“No,” Stan whispers.

“Don’t you remember, Stan?” Scars begin to carve themselves into his skin in a circle around his face, freshly cut and bleeding, the lines serrated as though from rows of jagged teeth. “Don’t you remember? I died, right here, down in the sewers, in the grey water under Derry. I never left. I’ve been waiting here for you all this time, because everyone left me, even you—” 

Stan’s hand lets go of the knife as though of its own accord; it clatters uselessly onto the ground. He can’t move. He can’t—

“You left me,” the boy starts to scream, voice shrill and piercing, and the scars are snaking down his neck, his arms, the palms of his hands, where they open up and bleed. His mouth is getting wider and wider; through his decaying teeth, Stan can make out the faintest white of light. “YOU LEFT ME! YOU LEFT ME—” 

“Holy shit,” Richie says. “Stan, don’t believe this guy—you had a rough puberty but you definitely weren’t as ugly as this.”

The boy freezes mid-scream, looming over Stan, who turns his head to see Richie, all grown up and grinning at him from the pews. Beside him is Eddie, who looks like he’s about to pass out, but he stands his ground.

The door is open behind them, and through it comes movement; Bev and Ben, bloody like they’ve climbed out of hell, hand in hand. Behind them is Mike, and a further ways back, the last is Bill, drenched wet and shivering.

They’re here, all of them, and Stan finds suddenly that he can speak.

“You came for me,” Stan says, astonished. 

“You told us where to look,” says Bill.

The boy before Stan starts to laugh, but it’s not a boy anymore, never was at all—its neck is elongating, its body expanding, head bulbous as a balloon. It grows so tall it crashes through the roof, shattering the synagogue into a million tiny shards of glass around them. Stan clenches his eyes shut, raising an arm to protect his head, and he remembers something—something in his pocket, something he reaches for and finds, fingers closing around the thin, waxy fabric and gripping it tight.

When he opens his eyes again he is unscathed from the glass, and the seven of them are standing at the lip of a cavern, and IT is swelled up huge and monstrous, serpentine arms uncoiling, reaching for the closest one of them; for Mike.

“I know what you are,” IT hisses, a single claw pointed, preparing to hook under Mike’s chin, the tender skin of his throat.

Richie’s hand is clenched in a fist. _No, no—_ “HEY, FUCKFACE!” he shouts. “Here’s a truth!” He rears his arm back to throw, and something hidden in his hand winks into the air. It’s his token from the arcade, and it carries all the secrets that had weighed down Richie’s pockets like stones, and now it sets them free. It sails through the air, spinning in a perfect arc, suspended in its own shaft of light, and hits the clown square in the face. 

Where it lands, it blisters. Hissing steam rises from its edges, glowing red-hot, searing into skin. IT howls; drops Mike against the rocks; rakes its talons down its face, claws gouging into its own eye, tearing wrinkled skin away like peeling paint. Still the token burns, and when it finally clatters down onto the ground, spent, it leaves behind a black hole eating away at raw flesh in an empty, drooping socket. The backwards lettering of _NO CASH VALUE_ is imprinted into the blistering skin of its eyelid like a brand.

Richie lets out an unbelieving, hysterical laugh. “Holy fucking shit! Did you see that? What a joke—” and above them, IT recoils as though physically hit, smashing into the cavern wall and bringing down a fall of crumbling rocks. They have to scramble to get out of the way; Bill lunges forward and drags Mike safely away from the barrage while Ben and Bev duck down behind one of the ribs of stone jutting out of the ground. Stan follows Richie and Eddie under the shelter of a craggy overhang, out of sight in the shadows.

“Your token,” Stan hisses. Outside, IT flings its tentacled arms into the walls of the cavern, raining down rocks. “How on earth did it—”

“Fuck if I know,” Richie hisses back. 

Beside them, Eddie’s breathing heavily. He’s got his inhaler out of his pocket, staring down at it. No, Stan thinks, not _now,_ of all the times for his fear to catch up to him—

“If you believe it,” Eddie says, and Stan freezes.

“Uh, Eds,” Richie says. “Placebo, remember?”

Eddie looks at him, eyes wide open, hands steady, and Stan says, “No, Eddie, _don’t—”_

“I believe,” Eddie says, amazed like he only just understands it himself, here in the dark looking at Richie looking back at him; “I believe it.” And he steps out into the light, and he’s shining, and he sprays the inhaler straight in IT’s giant, wrathful face. 

A fine mist shoots from the inhaler and burns acidic into skin. Again, IT recoils with a shriek, scuttling into the shadows. Stan stares, slack-jawed.

“Holy shit,” Richie says once again. “Eds, you fucking incredible genius, you did it.”

“You _literally_ did it first,” Eddie says, “god, you are so stupid.”

But it kind of sounds like they’re both saying the same thing.

“Oh, of course,” Mike says, looking faintly stunned, and he takes out the rock from his pocket, hurls it up high, and the entire left side of IT’s face caves in where it’s struck. A deflating balloon. Its skin ruptures like rubber, arms jerking uncontrollably through the air.

“It’s getting smaller!” Bill yells.

IT snarls through the slog of its face. “Small? I’m not _small—_ you’re small, all of you were so small, _Georgie_ was small, so small, so alone—”

Eddie sprays it again like a particularly stubborn cockroach. It reels away from him, wailing, and one of its limbs nearly smacks into Bev, who has to dive out of the way.

“Bev,” Ben shouts; he’s got the iron spike in his hands, and he tosses it to her, and she catches it. Over their heads, IT—still half-blinded in agony—whirls towards the direction of his voice, racing towards him impossibly, unnaturally fast.

“Ben!” IT singsongs, the pitch of its voice almost childlike in its desperation. “Ben, did you forget? You’re still you! You’re still you, fat little loser boy, building empty homes for people to love you in, but nobody wanted to stay in them, did they? You’re still you and you’re gonna die like you lived, all alone and unloved—”

“I don’t believe you,” Ben says, his face radiant with calm, and he’s not even looking at IT, but at the rest of them; his gaze lands on Bev, lingers there. He stands so tall, so strong that IT seems to wilt in comparison, frozen in its tracks an inch from his steadfast face. “I don’t believe in you. Maybe I once did, when I was a kid; it’s so easy even now, to remember that fear. But I have no reason to believe you now. And maybe not even then. I just couldn’t see it—but of course I couldn’t. I was only a child. It wasn’t fair. That’s why you go after children, isn’t it, Pennywise? You can’t bring down somebody your own size. But I’m not a child anymore, and you don’t scare me, and you never will again.”

He doesn’t lift a single finger, but IT collapses to the ground, shrinking so quickly Stan can barely see what it’s becoming: a faceless burning corpse, a moaning leper, a leering man. Bev steps up, iron spike in hand. Her hair on fire. She stabs IT straight through the chest, and it screams; skin flays off around the wound, flaking away in ashes. A blackened body with the head blown off. A spindly-legged, blond-haired head. The smeared grimace of a painting, whose face Stan even now still cannot understand. A little boy in a yellow raincoat, crying, scared—“Bill, it hurts! It hurts!”

“Fuck you,” Eddie snarls, making to raise his inhaler once more, but Bill steps forward, stares down at it, shakes his head.

“I know you’re not him,” he says, and he doesn’t sound angry—only sad. “I know you’re not him, because he’s long gone. And he doesn’t need this anymore, but maybe you do. More than I do, that’s for sure. So go on. Take it. You wanted it, didn’t you?”

He leans down and presses a folded paper boat into its hands.

IT lets out a pitiful moan of pain. Where the paper touches, it burns, until the skin of its hands is eating away at itself, unearthing dirt, flesh, bone—whatever it is that it’s made of. It’s shriveling down to a husk, and doesn’t even look like anything at all anymore. A single unblackened, unburnt eye rolls wildly in its socket; lands on Stan.

“Stanley,” IT croaks, the curl of the word almost loving, so sad. “You’re leaving me.”

And for the first time, Stan can even believe it.

At the centre of its chest is its heart, bared for all to see, a jewel glowing red. It’s so small. The size and shape of a bird’s egg. Stan reaches into its chest and pries it out of place. The final piece. 

“It’s cold,” he says, holding it; he can feel it seeping into his palms, as though the sharp edge of a piece of glass cutting into his skin, clear through his veins.

Beside him, Bill puts a hand over his, joining him. Richie, Eddie, Mike, Bev, and Ben. All seven of them in a circle, complete. Together, they crush the heart between their hands, and feel a warmth seep out from between their clasped hands like blood.

At their feet, the thing that was IT lets out an echo of a last, shivering breath.

“Is it,” Eddie says. “You know. Dead?”

“It looks dead,” Richie says, nudging the remains with his shoe. 

“It’s over,” Mike says, and he looks—not relieved, not shocked, not overwhelmed. He looks to closest to happy that Stan has seen him, in all the times he’s been here before.

“We did it,” Bev says, and over their heads, the ceiling of the cavern trembles and shifts, ancient rock cracking apart in the ground, letting go, beginning to fall. 

“RUN!” Bill shouts, and all of them spring into action. All except Stan, paralyzed with a sudden, sick terror: _this is it, this is the catch, it’s all going to happen again—_

His friends are running, pushing and pulling each other out of the rockfall. “FUCKING MOVE,” Richie bellows. Ben doesn’t even bother with words, just grabs onto Stan’s arm and starts running, and Bev’s got him by his other arm, and they’re all stumbling their way out, like there’s no question about it, no second thoughts: all that’s left to do is live.

Stan runs with them, runs to keep up, runs all the way out of the cavern and the tunnels and the collapsing wreck of Neibolt House, back into the early morning and pale sunlight and the cool dawn embrace of Derry.

He breathes. The air is sweet.

Somewhere, a bird is beginning to sing.

The quarry receives them with the same indulgence it afforded their thirteen-year-old selves, all sun-drenched warmth and still waters and the sky a generous strip of blue overhead. Like it was all along a place made for the seven of them, and it’s a senseless, selfish thought, but it crosses Stan’s mind all the same when Bev soars over the cliff’s edge, lands in the cradle of water and laughter with her hair streaking gold behind her, a falling star.

One by one, they take the plunge. Bill first gearing himself up with a deep breath; Mike with a whoop, hands high in the air; Ben in a neat swan dive that has Richie cheering, then shoving Eddie in after him while he’s distracted. “See you on the other side,” Richie tells Stan, jumping in after the sound of Eddie screaming all the way down, and it sounds enough like a promise for Stan to follow after. Loosen his limbs, hold his breath, and let himself fall.

He hits the water so deep he’s sure he must scrape bottom, but when he opens his eyes there’s nothing but endless green around and under and above him. Even down here, the sunlight penetrates through, a faint glimmer of a thread; at its other end, he can see the six silhouettes of his friends, treading water on the surface. He follows it back to them.

“I LOST MY GLASSES,” Richie’s saying very loudly when Stan breaks through, blindly splashing the water around him. “DOES ANYONE SEE THEM?”

“I got your glasses, asshole,” Eddie says.

“Thanks, man,” Richie says, reaching for them, and Eddie smacks his face with his empty hand, collapses into snorting laughter. “Oh, that’s so mature of you, Eds, you’ve got real charm going on for you—”

“Yeah, I learned it from your mom—”

Stan submerges again just for some peace and quiet. He can still hear their voice from above, muffled. He can see Ben diving down for Richie’s glasses at the bottom; Bev following after, her hair swirling red around them. He can see Mike standing in the shallows, and Bill nearby scrubbing at his face, eyes closed. He can feel his own limbs moving through the water, can hear his own heartbeat in the muted silence, slow and pulsing, steady. He can sense a wink of movement underneath him, gliding graceful through the water, old and patient and green. And he knows without having to look what it is; and he doesn’t look. 

He comes back up for air.

“What are you doing?” Eddie’s saying to Bill. “Are you cleaning yourself in this water right now? You can’t be serious. This isn’t—you’re all still taking showers after this, right, guys? I said _right,_ guys?”

“It’s too late, Eds,” Richie intones seriously, his glasses back on. “You’re already in here with all of us, you’re infected with our germs, and sorry to break it to you, but it’s an incurable condition.”

“It’s called being a Loser,” Ben says, cheerfully corny. Everyone groans.

“Yeah, that shit sticks for life,” Richie says.

Bill grins. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“For life,” Bev echoes, a beat late, and they all pause to let that sink in.

“What happens now?” Eddie says.

All eyes turn to Stan. 

Stan floats his palms facedown on the surface of the water. It’s like he’s holding the whole world in his hands, or else the other way around: it’s holding him. The water is so clear, shone through with light.

 _I don’t know,_ Stan thinks of saying, and _I’ve never gotten this far before,_ and _as long as I’m still this far, I’ll never know again._

“To be honest, I still don’t know if any of this is even real,” he says instead.

“What do you mean by real?” Bev asks. The sky is so blue, reflected in her eyes. 

“Well,” Stan says. It’s all very matter-of-fact. “What’s real is if I put my head down under the water right now and drown, and then I die. What isn’t real is if I put my head down under the water right now and drown, and then I die, and then I’m in my living room and Mike’s calling me again, calling me back here. To do it all and die and come back all over again.”

“Look,” Eddie says, “it was some kind of fucked-up nightmare that Pennywise made you live through, but we beat IT, it’s over—”

Stan shakes his head. “I know that would be the explanation that makes sense. I know all of this sounds crazy. But I told you—it’s bigger than that. Bigger than us.” Bigger, too, than life; than death. A power that pulls the strings between everything. That parts the water when he enters it and bathes the back of his neck in shifting light as the sun moves across the sky and sets the years of soil under his feet. A power linking through the seven of them, and can he feel that yank of the chain now? The flick of the switch bringing it all back to darkness?

“You’re not crazy,” Mike says quietly. 

Stan looks up. There is a curious, contemplative expression on his face.

“It makes sense,” Mike says, “that you’ve had to live through this over and over again so many times that moving forward would seem impossible. But doesn’t it also make sense that this is precisely what you lived through all of it for? To be able to move forward?” 

Things make a sick kind of sense in Derry. Stan knows this as intimately as a bone left to settle ever just so slightly out of joint, so that the grinding pain is one that does not grow with you so much as it grows into you. There is beauty in Derry, and there is also the worst kind of unimaginable horror; there is childish cruelty and human neglect and awful harm that will be done to you, but never to you alone, and that is both a curse and a blessing, for when you run there will always be others running with you; there is love here, and there is fear here, and you will forget both, hands letting go of what they once held, twin scars in your palms. That is the way it has always been. 

Another way to put it: that is the way it has been up to now. 

Stan lets his hands sink under the surface. 

Beside him, Richie makes his move. Grabs Stan by the back of the collar and dunks him in the water. 

“That real enough for you?” Richie crows.

Bev smacks him; Bill takes a step forward, concerned; Eddie’s shouting something unintelligible as usual. Stan rises out of the water, hooks an arm around Richie’s neck, and easily, obligingly muscles him under the surface.

“Attaboy, Stan the Man,” Richie wheezes when he resurfaces, through a choking mouthful of water.

“You are unbefucking-LIEVABLE,” Eddie tells him.

Stan starts to laugh.

Everybody looks stunned, even Richie.

Then Mike starts to laugh, too, bending over from the force of it, and Bev bites her lip but can’t quite contain a loud snort, and Ben looks at her with a look of such shocked delight that everybody else is pushed over the edge. It’s the kind of raucous laughter that always rang out too loud in school hallways and cinemas and libraries, that drew glaring eyes and snide whispers, but here in this space there’s so much room for it to expand, all above and around them like a living thing, or else just the thing that lets life be known: here it is. Here we are.

“Here’s what happens now,” Stan suggests. “We get out of here, and we eat something, and then we sleep for twenty hours.”

“Now that’s a plan I can get behind,” Ben says, grinning.

“Anyone else up for Chinese?” Richie says, wiping his glasses off with the fabric of his shirt, so when Eddie splashes him in response it gets him satisfyingly right in the eyes.

The call comes in the evening.

After they had gotten all their stories straight, and gotten through the police questioning, and also gotten some food, there was nowhere else to go but the Townhouse. Still, there had been a reluctance to let each other go; to be alone. Instead they congregated in one of the rooms and talked. And once they talked the memories started to flow, no longer scattered pieces that washed up on the banks but a single unbroken, unending stream. Which led to the seven of them sitting artlessly arranged over various pieces of hotel furniture as they shouted over each other and gesticulated wildly to emphasize their points and finished off each other’s sentences. Like this:

“—said he was gonna act as a lookout, said _I’m not gonna fall_ and what does he do, what does the fucking genius do—”

“Bullshit!” Richie jabbed a finger at Eddie’s smug face. “It was _you_ who distracted me—”

“Distracted you, how the hell was I distracting you—”

“—by screaming your head off about how I was gonna break my neck and my legs and my spine in three places, which by the way I didn’t—”

“Yeah, but you were acting like you did,” Bev pointed out, “you made so much noise that we all had to run after that anyway, even with your busted up ankle—”

“Mike and I had to carry you,” Ben said, head leant back against the wall from his spot on the floor, “you were going on about how you were gonna die—”

“I was _not_ —”

“You absolutely were,” Mike said, hiding his grin in his palm.

Richie changed tracks immediately. “Okay well can you blame me, with this fucker over here going on and on about how my ankle was gonna get infected and I was gonna get gangrene and my skin was gonna fall off—”

“At least it stopped you from climbing trees for the entire rest of the summer,” Bill said with a snicker.

“Bill, didn’t you eat a worm once just because Richie dared you to?” Stan said mildly.

“No fucking way,” Bev said, shaking her head.

Mike looked at Bill, not shocked or disgusted but considering, as though sizing up the likelihood. “Really?”

Bill had a sour expression on his face. “I’d forgotten that until you just reminded me, Stan,” he said. “And that goes for the taste, too.”

And in the laughter that followed and in the urgency to recount that story, and the next, and the next, the hours passed them by and left them somewhere in the night, in the dark. And then Richie and Eddie had passed out on the bed and Bill was hunched over his laptop at the table, face lit white by the glow of his screen, with Mike standing over his shoulder and murmuring something soft by his ear, and Stan silently got up from the floor from between a snoring Bev and Ben and stole into the bathroom. The door locked behind him with a quiet, efficient click.

Now, as he presses his phone to his ear, his cheek, he imagines the scene on the other side: in the bedroom, perhaps? The kitchen, fumbling for a glass of water in the dark? Or the living room, in the lamplight, the television a steady rumble in the background, left on for the white noise? Outside, at home—is it raining?

“Patty,” he says. He means to keep his voice low, so as to not wake the others, but as he speaks he finds his throat raw from talking so much, and the name comes out as a croak anyway. He tries again. “Patty—it’s me.”

“Of course I know it’s you.” The crackle of her voice over the phone nearly buckles his knees. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. He finds himself grasping the cold porcelain of the sink with one hand, clutching his phone tight in the other. He says it again: “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Stan,” Patty says, and he can hear the questions in her voice— _what made you forget to call, what made you leave so suddenly, why haven’t you ever told me about your hometown, why haven’t you ever told me about your childhood, where have you gone? Where are you now?_ She asks them all in one: “Are you all right?”

Stans grip goes even tighter around the phone. “Yes—everything’s all right, now.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

A smile comes to his lips by its own volition. “I think I will be,” he admits.

A long sigh on the other end; he can envision her in his mind’s eye, an absentminded hand at her temple, her sleepless stare out the window. “Good,” she says. “Good.”

“I’m coming home soon.”

“You did what you went there to do?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did.” Stan rubs at his jaw. “We did.” 

There is a pause, then, like she’s waiting for something. He knows what it is; what it’s always been. Its presence in the air, the length of a shadow between them, one following after him for years now, though he could never see it, only sense its company. But now that he can see it, the shape that it has made, he finds there is less to fear about it. After all, now he knows it is there. 

“I’ll tell you all about it,” Stan says. “When I get home.”

On the other side, Patty lets out a breath, as though one she has been holding for a very long time. “Okay,” she says, and then, “I love you.”

“I love you,” he says back, and he has never said anything easier, and as he says it something loosens in his chest, a weight lifting with wings.

He hangs up the phone.

A shower, he thinks; he should take a shower. Tidy himself up. His whole body aches—how is he only just beginning to notice? He’s tired. He needs to sleep. He needs...

In the travel kit—Bill’s? Eddie’s?—balanced on the corner of the sink, zipper half-open, there lies a sharp silver glint.

Slowly, without even thinking about it, Stan reaches into the bag and pulls out the razor.

He stares down at it in his hand. It lies flat against the bandages on his palm where he’d been cut up by the broken glass down in the funhouse with Bill. The skin is all covered up, so he can’t see if the scar still lies there, not anymore. A sense of unease prickles the back of his neck; the urge to peel back the bandages, to check. There should be a scar, shouldn’t there? There’s always been a scar.

He lifts his gaze to his reflection in the bathroom mirror. The curl of his hair falling over his eyes, the pinched exhaustion in the gaunt hollows of his face. The scars there, old and faded, faint as the lines of purple veins that run under the skin. The ones that will never leave him.

He finds himself climbing into the bathtub, still fully clothed, still holding the razor, cushioned in the bandages wrapped around his hands. Sits with the faucet digging into his back, a slow drip from the leaking showerhead wetting the back of his neck. He stares at the blade he holds. The shine of its straight edge. How familiar it feels to wield the blade with intent. 

This isn’t real: the living room is real, Patty laughing on the couch at the television screen, the lamplight spun gold around them, safe. He has to wake up. He has to go back. _Do it; do it now or Richie’s gonna run and Mike’ll get his throat cut out and Bill’s heart will get eaten alive and there’ll be no one left to save; do it because you have done it before and you will have to do it again, it is the only thing you can do, the only thing you are here to do; do it because you’re dead anyway and if you don’t you’ll spend every living minute wondering, looking for the trick in the light, the flaw of the world; do it because at least then you’ll know._

The blade in his hand. The water dripping down the back of his neck. The itch in his palms.

He considers these things very carefully in his head.

“Hurry up, whoever’s in there, I gotta take a leak, c’mon.”

Stan slits open his eyes. Light streams in from the window, pale gold. Dust in the air.

Somebody’s banging on the bathroom door. 

He’s slumped in the bathtub, the back of his shirt soaked through. He must have fallen asleep, at some point, during the night. The razor has slipped out of his hand and onto the white porcelain of the tub. He stares at it. 

“Seriously, you either open up right now or I’m gonna have to go in this potted plant, is that what you want me to do? Kill this plant?”

Stan clambers out of the tub. Picks up the razor and returns it to the travel kit. He zips it back up neatly. In the mirror, his reflection looks back at him. Meets his steady-eyed gaze.

“Oh, thank God,” Richie says when Stan opens the door, shouldering past him. “Hey, dude, do you mind?”

Stan steps outside and closes the door. In the room, Eddie’s still snoring; there’s an empty space on the bed next to him and an impression in the sheets, just recently vacated. Bev and Ben are conspicuously absent. Mike’s in the armchair, hands folded over his chest, face bared open in his sleep. Bill’s slumped in the chair at the desk, hunched over his laptop, which still waits patiently, screen aglow. 

Stan quietly shuts the laptop closed for him, and as he does, Bill grunts awake, shifting, blinking up at him.

“Stan?” he says sleepily. “Yuh-you’re still here.”

Stan stares back at him. _Of course I am,_ he could say, but he decides to do away with the pretenses. Here, at this early hour, with Bill, of all people, he can be honest. “I’m here,” he says instead; an agreement. 

“Stan, I’m sorry,” Bill says.

Stan’s stare gains an incredulous edge, as though he’s misheard. “What? For what?”

“I didn’t know,” Bill says, a drowsy murmur. “I didn’t—” He blinks, and seems to wake up a little more, eyes clearing slightly. “I didn’t know what was happening to you. What you were going through. I should’ve noticed something... I should’ve helped.”

A fond, familiar irritation rises up in Stan. “Go back to sleep,” he says, and then, “you did help.”

“Wha—?”

“Don’t worry about it, Big Bill,” Stan says, at the same time as the bathroom door bangs open and Richie declares, “Good _morning_ my body feels like it was put through a garbage disposal,” at the same time as the hotel door unlocks and Bev and Ben breeze in, clad in sunglasses and looking cheerfully put-together, bearing coffee trays and paper bags.

“We got breakfast!” Bev announces.

From the bed, Eddie startles to attention with a snort, hand reaching out for the space beside him. “Hgguh?”

“Pancakes?” Mike asks, looking suspiciously awake all of a sudden.

“Are those my sunglasses?” Bill says, squinting at Bev.

Outside, Stan knows, there will be shapes and shifting things in the darkness, so long as there is darkness, so long as he looks for them. But here he can sit down at the table with his friends, reach for his share of what is given, soak up the warmth of morning. And maybe he’ll never know the truth of it for certain, but he finds now that it isn’t so very difficult to believe. Everywhere around him, here they are, here they have always been: signs of life. 

Stan sits down at the table. He smiles at his friends.

“Good morning,” he says.

The sunlight spun gold in the room breaks open. Runs free. 

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT 03/01/21: please look at [this beautiful fanart](https://twitter.com/dearfutures/status/1366633582635089920) of the scene of stan riding on the back of silver with bill (one of my personal favourite scenes hehe), commissioned from @[ceeejus](https://twitter.com/ceeejus) on twitter as a birthday gift T___T thank you so much savannah you're the sweetest ever ily!! ♡♡♡
> 
> there are no words for how much the process of writing this fic made me lose my mind. highlights include: genuinely forgetting at one point that eddie died in canon, going over my own ao3 draft with a chrome highlighter web extension, innocently taking a "Which Member of the Losers Club Are You?" quiz when i was 30k deep into writing this and somehow being blindsided when i got stan, and finishing this like two months ago and just... never posting it for some reason. amazing!
> 
> most legendary of all, though, i have to mention the fact that i originally started out this fic as an exploration of stan's decision to take himself off the board and fully intended to end this fic with his suicide as portrayed in the movie, only to decide over halfway through that Actually, He Should Live, which turned this whole thing into the complete opposite of what i'd planned and the last thing i ever thought i'd write: a fix-it fic. but now, of course, i recognize that this was all along what this story had to be. but i found it kinda interesting that changing the plot of this fic into a fix-it stemmed entirely from the realization, as i wrote it, that i wanted the skateboard kid to survive. everything else, including the entire last part of this fic, grew from that tiny, essential point.
> 
> if you've read this far, thank you for indulging this labour of love.


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